Idiopathic Arterial Calcification in Infancy.

Arterial calcification has been known to occur in infancy since the early reports of Durante (1899) and Bryant and White (1901). In many instances arterial lesions have been associated with renal disease, hypervitaminosis-D or congenital anomalies of the heart and great vessels, but more rarely there has been no demonstrable primary disease. About 50 cases of this idiopathic type of arterial calcification in infancy have now been described and the published material has been comprehensively reviewed on several occasions (Field, 1946; Stryker, 1946; Moran and Becker, 1959). Nevertheless, our knowledge of the condition has not progressed beyond the descriptive stage, and hypotheses of its aetiology show no advance on those put forward by Stryker in 1946. From the standpoint of morbid anatomy and histology the cases described have been carbon-copies of each other and the various published photographs of the lesions could be interchanged without loss of context. Clinically, too, the cases have often been similar with sudden death as a usual occurrence. Although idiopathic arterial calcification in infancy is not well known it is probably not as rare as the small number of recorded cases suggests. In addition to the two cases described here we know of two others that have not been recorded. We think, therefore, that this report is worth while, in the hope that wider recognition of the disease may lead to diagnosis during life and the institution of clinical and biochemical studies without which little further progress in understanding the disease is likely.