Vitamin K Deficiency
1 Miami Children's Hospital, 6125 Southwest 31st St, Miami, FL 33155
To the Editor.
The article by Payne and Hasegawa1 on vitamin K deficiency of the newborn correctly stresses the existence of differences between vitamin K deficiency and Coumadin effect. This has been somewhat forgotten in important studies on the mode of action of prothrombin.2-4 Modern techniques as the Echis time5 and certain sophisticated electrophoretic6 methods confirm the suspected differences between these two disorders. However, many years ago it was shown7-9 that microgram doses of any vitamin K rapidly corrected the coagulation defect in deficiency.




