Early prenatal vitamins use may reduce autism risk

[Celebration]

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-early-prenatal-vitamins-autism.html

Women who reported not taking a daily prenatal vitamin immediately before and during the first month of pregnancy were nearly twice as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder as women who did take the supplements — and the associated risk rose to seven times as great when combined with a high-risk genetic make-up, a study by researchers at the UC Davis MIND Institute has found.

"Mothers of children with autism were significantly less likely than those of typically developing children to report having taken prenatal vitamins during the three months before and the first month of pregnancy," said Rebecca J. Schmidt, assistant professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences in the UC Davis School of Medicine and the study's lead author.

The finding was "strong and robust," the study authors said, and is the first to suggest a concrete step women can take that may reduce the risk of having a child with autism. The study, "Prenatal vitamins, functional one-carbon metabolism gene variants, and risk for autism in the CHARGE Study," is published online today (May 24) on the website of the journal Epidemiology. It is scheduled to appear in print in July.

Consuming prenatal vitamins may be especially effective for genetically susceptible mothers and their children. For women with a particular high-risk genetic make up who reported not taking prenatal vitamins, the estimated risk of having a child with autism was as much as seven times greater than in women who did report taking prenatal vitamins and who had more favorable gene variants, the study found.

The authors postulate that folic acid, the synthetic form of folate or vitamin B9, and the other B vitamins in prenatal supplements likely protect against deficits in early fetal brain development. Folate is known to be critical to neurodevelopment and studies have found that supplemental folic acid has the potential to prevent up to 70 percent of neural tube defects, the authors said

[SheilaT]

1. Well, I didn't take prenatal vitamins either time

I was pregnant, and only one of the two is autistic.

In addition, since pre-natal vitamins are relatively new, maybe in the past fifty or so years, and are probably by now taken by nearly 100% of pregnant women in this country, then why does the incidence of autism seem to be rising? There's an inconsistency here.

[pnwmom]

2. There are probably a number of different factors that can raise the risk

of developing autism, depending on individual biological factors. Each of your children was born with individual genetic predispositions, and each was exposed to a different set of circumstances in the womb and in the first months of life. It is possible that one was vulnerable to a deficiency in folate, for example, and the other was not. Or perhaps in one of your pregnancies you were exposed to some toxin that combined with nutritional factors to trigger autism. More and more scientists think the autism syndrome results from a combination of different environmental, biological, and genetic factors -- which may vary in different children.

Part of the reason pre-natal vitamins are important now is that the American diet is much more based on processed foods than it was 50 years ago. Processed foods often have the vitamins and minerals processed out of them -- thus, the need for supplementation.

The number of women taking prenatal tablets before pregnancy and during the first month is not anywhere near 100%. You yourself didn't take them -- and neither did half the women in this study. Most women don't start to take them until after their first prenatal visit, if they EVER take them; and by then it's past the critical period for affecting the development of autism, according to this study.

Obviously, pre-natal vitamins don't entirely eliminate the chance of having a baby with autism, so there must be other factors involved, too. Still, if this study turns out to be correct it would represent a major advance.

[saras]

3. There's also not much link between autism and neural-tube defects

The authors appear to be making a guess, based on insufficient evidence (i.e. the results of one study)

[hedgehog]

4. Hmmmm....... studies have shown that our vegetables just aren't

as nutritious as they used to be. If they don't have the same level of vitamins and minerals that we know to look for, what else could now be missing?