Oral Vitamin K for newborns?
Reminder: If you are planning to use oral Vitamin K for your baby, bring it with you to the hospital or wherever you are giving birth!!!!
I recommend vitamin K shot at birth for all babies, but if your family has decided to do the oral vitamin K instead, PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU HAVE IT WITH YOU when you give birth or check in advance with the hospital where you are delivering to make sure their pharmacy has it. Most hospitals only stock the shot.
In the US, injection of vitamin K is recommended for all babies at birth to prevent bleeding. Vitamin K is critical to clotting (or the body’s process to stop bleeding). It does not get to your baby through the placenta, so babies are essentially born without any vitamin K and at high risk of all kinds of bleeding. The bleeding we most aggressively want to prevent is spontaneous bleeding inside the brain that always leads to brain damage and almost always results in death that happens around 3-8 weeks of life without cause or warning, and by the time we identify what is happening it is too late. One vitamin K injection at birth will prevent 100% of these late bleeds. There are breakthrough cases reported after oral vitamin K, but studies show oral vitamin K is more effective than no vitamin K (and again, less effective than the shot).
In the few countries where oral vitamin K is used, it is given within the first 8 hours after birth, so if you want your oral vitamin K to be effective, please bring it with you to where you are giving birth, or strongly consider getting the injection to protect your baby instead because we have no data on if it is effective if you start it after you go home.
If your baby is at high risk of bleeding – has had a traumatic delivery (long pushing or used a vacuum), is actively bleeding anywhere, has received antibiotics (disrupting their ability to absorb vitamin K and other medications through their gut), is born early (also more difficult to absorb nutrients for the gut) – the injection is a much, much safer choice.
