Considerations on Combined Factor VII and Factor VIII Defect

Antonio Girolami, Giovanni M. Patrassi and Renzo Dal Boanon, Institute of ‘Semeiotica Medica’, University of Padua Medical School, Padua (Italy) We have read with great interest the paper by Machin and Muller [5] on a new family with combined factor VII and factor VIII deficiency. It always gives a great satisfaction to find a confirmation of personal observations made years ago [2]. The family presented by the authors seems a case of type II combined factor VII and factor VIII deficiency. The term type II should be limited to those patients showing a similar depression in factor VII and factor VIII and no heterozygosis for factor VII deficiency in the relatives. On the contrary, type I combined deficiency should be limited to those cases representing a causal association of heterozygosis for factor VII deficiency and hemophilia A [4]. The patient studied by Gaston et al. [1] belongs perhaps to this Table I. Tentative classification of combined deficiency of factor VII and factor VIII in two groups