Vitamin K Deficiency Bleeding in Newborn and Young Infants

Abstract

Vitamin K deficiency during the early neonatal period has been a major hemorrhagic disorder of thenewborn for a long time. On the other hand, vitamin K deficiency occurring in infants over 2 weeks of age was first reported in the second half of the 1970's. Infantile vitamin K deficiency frequently occurred in breast-fed infants, and attracted public attention as a negative factor of breast feeding because it induced intracranial hemorrhage in many cases, and resulted in death or sequelae in more than half of the cases. Although the incidence of these diseases was sharply reduced by preventive vitamin K administration at birth, discharge from the maternity ward, and theone month of age health checkup, a considerable number of infants still develop vitamin K deficiency bleeding. In EU countries such as France and England, weekly or daily oral administration of a vitamin K preparation was introduced, and the disease has not developed in any infants to whom a vitamin K preparation is administered by these prophylactic regimens. Thus, in Japan, new guidelines (draft) have been proposed in order to eradicate the vitamin K deficiency in infancy.