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Vitamin K supplementation at birth

Sa • Thu, May 11

Vitamin K is a fat-soluable vitamin essential for blood clotting. We cannot make this vitamin on our own, it comes from the plants we consume. Newborns are almost always critically low in this vitamin which puts them at risk for spontaneous bleeding until they start eating solid foods around 6 months.

Spontaneous bleeding can occur days after birth and usually shows itself on the umbilical stump, in the nose or on the skin. But later spontaneous bleeding can occur several weeks or months after birth and often happens on the brain which can cause irreparable brain damage or death.

This sort of bleeding (called vitamin K deficiency bleeding- VKDB) is very rare, however detrimental if not caught in time.

VKDB can be completely avoided if newborns are given a shot of vitamin K within a few hours of birth, however many parents are choosing to decline the shot because it's "unnatural" or full of "toxins" (it's not full of "toxins"). What are your thoughts? With your own babies, are you for or against administering the vitamin K injection?

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