VITAMIN A ABSORPTION IN THE NEWBORN

IN 1946 a paper was presented from this laboratory in which it was shown that vitamin A when administered in aqueous mediums is absorbed more readily than vitamin A administered in oil. 1 In the course of these investigations, it was observed that in normal infants the absorption of vitamin A, as measured by the vitamin A tolerance test, tends to be low. Moreover, a review of the literature 2 indicated that the percentage of fat in the stool is higher in young children than is normally observed in older children. These observations suggested to us that a diminished rate of intestinal absorption of fats in general, and more specifically vitamin A in oil, exists in young children. This phenomenon should be even more pronounced in the newborn. For this reason, our studies, in which we compared the intestinal absorption of vitamin A in aqueous dispersion with that of. the