To vitamin K or not to Vitamin K…

[KLMmumma]

Hey ladies, did anyone decline their vitamin K shots or if not entirely decline then opt for oral drops ? Any stories or it being good or bad ? As always there is pretty contradictory articles online about its risks vs benefits with ingredients and reactions. I’ve said no in my birthing plan but think I might change my mind if there’s little risk. Midwives has said better to get it.

I went with the drops, got the second dose to give at home (no trip back to the hospital) - Vit D drops weren't a problem to give I found either..

I certainly read about vitamin k before I had my babies but nothing I know nor could find out convinced me not having it was better than having it.

Likewise. It's not always a case of parents just blindly following advice without question but I couldn't find anything to argue reasonably as to why my child shouldn't have it and often when people ask about going against general medical advice they are doing so because they have seen scaremongering nonsense which should rightly be pointed out.

We are so lucky to live in an age where we can so easily avoid many risks to our newborn babies.

Not true. We were discharged with vit K to give our baby at home as opted for oral. Also she didn't spit them out.

We got it injected. No idea why you'd decline it altogether- it's to protect your baby.

www.aims.org.uk/information/item/vitamin-k

This is a useful article. I got a bit twitchy about giving vitamin K as it says that we don't know why newborns have low levels and that high levels of vit K could potentially cause harm that we don't yet know about as not a lot of research has been done in this area. But ultimately I decided to give the oral drops as I knew I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if she was in that small % that suffers a bleed.

DS2 didn't get it. He was a surprise, paramedic delivered, baby, and noone seemed to know how to deal with it. So, paramedics didn't have it, midwife - when arrived - wasn't prepared for a home birth, and when we got to the hospital for the post birth checks, they couldn't compute it hadn't happened.

Most babies who don’t have supplemental vitamin K will be fine, in the way that most people who don’t wear a seatbelt in a car are fine. I could say that we were driven on short trips as a child with no car seats, five children in the back of a car including some in the footwell and we were fine. But we were only fine because there wasn’t a crash, and no doubt many other children driven around like that in 1990’s were not fine. The problem is that there’s no way to test which infants are susceptible to VKDB so it’s safest to offer vitamin K to all babies. We don’t know why newborns have low vitamin K levels, maybe there’s an evolutionary reason, or it could just be that on an evolutionary level a small minority of babies dying is irrelevant so there’s no drive for selection of higher levels of vitamin K in babies.

They’ve been giving vitamin k jabs for about 60 years. It’s to prevent a dangerous condition where they bleed internally which can kill small babies because without the vitamin k they can’t make a clot. This condition VKDB will kill about 1 in 5 of the babies who get it.

For me it was 100% a certain yes decision to protect my precious baby from this awful condition. The side effects are basically low to none.

Some more info here -

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/vitamink/faqs.html

There is evidence that the drops are less effective than the injection (possibly because the complete course of drops doesn't always get completed).

Certainly the only two babies I've seen in my 20+ year career with haemorrhage disease of the newborn hadn't had the injection. (One had partial drops and the other nothing).

As a clinician it would be a no-brainer for me to get the IM injection.

The evidence isn't at all contradictory or unclear. Responsible parents get the shot.

Never even crossed my mind to say no.

It was done whilst I was birthing the placenta so didn’t even realise baby had had any injection.

What is ‘research’ though? Googling isn’t research, as it will tell you anything.

Mine would you not? Mine had the injections and they didn’t even notice.

I did research because I had never heard of it until I was pregnant.

I couldn’t find any evidence against having it.

I could only find evidence of the risks of not having it. The reported side effects were some mild bruising around the injection site. My child had the injection. He is absolutely fine. Why wouldn’t you prevent something that was completely preventable?

I had this question at the midwife at the other day. Ive looked up pros and cons and there seems to be very little in terms of cons and a lot of pros so i have consented to my baby having it.

As someone who's seen the horror of VKDB (at work, not my baby) PLEASE get it. Even if you don't want the injection for your baby, do the drops. Its so not worth the risk and potential heartbreak. I will never, ever forget hugging that mum while she cried and screamed that she wished she'd got it.

I've had 4, all had vit k injection, no issues. Hth

Equally I gave all 3 of mine the shot and they’re alive and well too.

Hey all thank you for your messages. This was the article I read this morning … agreed that it isn’t an accredited source. www.beingsummershores.com/blog/avoid-that-newborn-vitamin-k-shot

I then looked up the uk ingredients sheet vs the American one. The Vit K is synthetic and made from different compounds… so I didn’t like the thought of that being the first thing my baby injested and also couldn’t understand logically why a baby would be born deficient in anything. I do however after reading this and some of the pages you’ve posted (thank you) think I’m going to change my mind and get it.

the thing is with maternity and paediatric care is that as it’s un ethical to trial and test on baby’s, nothing is so it is good to do research. I also agree that google is a crap place to do research! I don’t take any decision lightly. I can’t find a lot of proof of actual risks, and from my understanding pretty much every baby gets it and is fine in the uk? I just wanted to talk to some real mums that had got it… so I recon after this I’m going to get it.

Listen to your midwife. Get the shot.

Stop reading crap sources.

A good technique for these questions is to start on Wikipedia, then follow the references. Find something from a good looking source (like a proper medical journal) and follow the link to check it really exists (should be fine, but many pages on wikipedia can be edited by anyone). Then read the abstract from the paper. The best kinds of papers to read are meta-studies - papers that look at lots of research done by lots of people over a period of time.

So start here :
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_K
Then read the relevant section (supplementation in newborns) and find a good looking reference - reference 18 looks good.
Then check the paper looks legit and have a read of the beginning and end.
www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/134095/1/MihatschWA_2016.pdf