Vitamin D is one of the most important supplements women are advised to follow regularly after conceiving a child. Discontinuing or skipping the medication is harmful for both the baby and the mother. Supporting this factor and highlighting the risks, a new study from Spain found vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy having a negative impact on the baby's brain development.
The findings of the study published online in Pediatrics found mothers with a history of vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy, having children with lower mental and motor skills, further leading to lower IQs compared to other children of mothers with sufficient level of Vitamin D during pregnancy.
"These differences in the mental and psychomotor development scores do not likely make any difference at the individual level, but might have an important impact at the population level," Health Day quoted lead author Dr. Eva Morales, a medical epidemiologist in the Center for Research in Environmental Epidemiology in Barcelona, as saying.
For the study, Morales and colleagues included 1,820 Spanish women, majority of them in the second trimester. Of the total participants, 20 percent were found vitamin D deficient and another 32 percent with inadequate levels of vitamin D.
All the babies of the participants underwent some developmental tests at 14 months of age. The results showed children of vitamin D deficient mothers scoring less in both mental, (2.6 points lower )and psychomotor tests ( 2.3 points lower) compared with the other group of children, and thus cutting down the number of children with above- average intelligence -IQ scores higher than 110 points- into half.
Apart from these risks, earlier studies have found some other risks of having a low vitamin D level during pregnancy. According to the Vitamin D council, pregnant women with a low vitamin D level are more likely to have a C-section than a normal birth and at a greater risk of developing pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes.
Vitamin D supplement is unavoidable during pregnancy as a severe deficiency can lead to infantile rickets and adequate levels can lower childhood wheezing and type 1 diabetes in children. According to a review of vitamin supplementation in pregnancy, carried out by researchers from the Division of Women's Health at King's College London, women with vitamin D deficiency and obese women should take 10 micrograms per day to solve the problem.
