Treatment of Life-Threatening Infantile Hemangiomas with Vincristine

To the Editor: We describe two cases of corticosteroid-resistant, life-endangering hemangioma treated with vincristine: a benign hemangioendothelioma in a patient with Kasabach-Merritt syndrome and a liver hemangioendothelioma. Mortality rates among patients with these kinds of hemangioma can be as high as 40 percent and may be more than 50 percent if poor prognostic factors are present. 1 , 2 Corticosteroids are the medical treatment of choice, except for resistant cases, 3 which are not infrequent. The first patient was a nine-month-old baby who presented with a tumor 10 cm in diameter in the left supraclavicular region and a platelet count of 7400 per . . .