Written by Greg Arnold, DC, CSCS. Those supplementing with folic acid for more than a year had a 70% reduced risk of pre-term birth (between 20 and 28 weeks of pregnancy) and a 50% reduced risk of pre-term birth.
Pre-term birth puts both the health of the baby and the mother at risk. In the newborn, pre-term birth increases the risk of health complications as well as lasting disabilities such as mental retardation, cerebral palsy, lung and gastrointestinal problems, vision and hearing loss, and even death (1). For the mother, pre-term birth increases the risk of cardiovascular disease later in life. Specifically, women who have delivered pregnancies before 37 weeks of pregnancy have a 300% increased risk of cardiovascular death (2).
More than a half million infants were born pre-term in 2004, the highest number reported since comparable national data on gestational age have been available (1981) (3). Now a new study (4) has found that taking folic acid before pregnancy may help with a healthy pregnancy.
In the study, researchers conducted interviews with more than 34,000 women during the first three months of their pregnancy and asked them whether or not they had taken folic acid supplements before conception. They then followed the mothers through pregnancy and found that compared to those who had not taken any folic acid supplements, those supplementing for more than a year had a 70% reduced risk of pre-term birth between 20 and 28 weeks of pregnancy and a 50% reduced risk of pre-term birth between 28 and 32 weeks. There was no reduced risk beyond 32 weeks with supplementation.
For the researchers, folic acid supplementation before pregnancy “is associated with a 50%–70% reduction in the incidence of early spontaneous pre-term birth.” Unfortunately, the researchers did not state what the average folic acid supplement dose was during the year before conception, but the current recommendation is 600 micrograms per day during pregnancy (5).
Source: Bukowski, Radek, et al. “Preconceptional folate supplementation and the risk of spontaneous preterm birth: a cohort study.” PLoS Med 6.5 (2009): e1000061.
© 2009 Bukowski et al. Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Click here to read the full text study.
Posted July 8, 2009.
References:
- “Facts: Preterm Birth” posted on the March of Dimes website.
- H. Irgens, L. Reisaeter, L. Irgens and R. Lie, Long term mortality of mothers and fathers after pre-eclampsia: population based cohort, BMJ 323 (2001), pp. 1213–1217.
- “Preliminary Births 2004: Infant and Maternal Health” posted on the Centers for Disease Control website.
- Bukowski et al. Preconceptional Folate Supplementation and the Risk of Spontaneous Preterm Birth: A Cohort Study. PLoS Medicine, 2009; 6 (5).
- “Folic Acid” posted on the National Institute of Health website.
