Hi, your friendly, local pathologist here. I'm the kind of doctor that diagnoses liver diseases, cancer, lots of infections, inflammatory processes, benign tumors, and runs the lab that a lot of other doctors use the results from to inform a lot of their other decisions.
If you really want to learn about this stuff, Robert Weinberg's The Biology of Cancer is where to start. It introduces concepts starting where a high school student could understand and carefully walks through the history of our development of knowledge until, by the end, the pithy chapters are helping novel concepts for real science flower in your brain all on their own. It's the best book of biological science I have ever read. 10/10, will read again.
Pathology... reminds me of all those studies with accident victims all over the world (and often as early as the 70s - today's numbers are likely much worse) that show 30% or half the population being liver-toxic in vitamin A (in all age groups). Lots of health problems are simply downstream from that.
Possibly if you have many symptoms that sound like isotretinoin or tretinoin side effects (the latter is active vitamin A, the former just a twisted form of it).
As for measuring: there might be spillover of retinyl esters (storage form in the liver) into serum, but that's nothing that's commonly measured. (Serum retinol levels do not correlate with liver levels AT ALL.)
At least for isotretinoin, that would look like: dry skin, chapped lips, dry eyes, dry nostrils, dry mouth, photosensitivity, body aches in the morning.
It can also raise liver enzyme values and change lipid values.
(I recently finished a round of Accutane, basically high dose vitamin A)
0xWTF · · focus · HN ↗
If you really want to learn about this stuff, Robert Weinberg's The Biology of Cancer is where to start. It introduces concepts starting where a high school student could understand and carefully walks through the history of our development of knowledge until, by the end, the pithy chapters are helping novel concepts for real science flower in your brain all on their own. It's the best book of biological science I have ever read. 10/10, will read again.
<a href="https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393887655" rel="nofollow">https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393887655
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
mikeodds · · focus · HN ↗
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
As for measuring: there might be spillover of retinyl esters (storage form in the liver) into serum, but that's nothing that's commonly measured. (Serum retinol levels do not correlate with liver levels AT ALL.)
cj · · focus · HN ↗
It can also raise liver enzyme values and change lipid values.
(I recently finished a round of Accutane, basically high dose vitamin A)