African-American Mothers on Multis Have Healthy-Weight Babies
Lee Swanson Research Update
That statement was the jumping-off point for a new study examining the benefits of multivitamins for pregnant women. Researchers found that daily supplements of multivitamins may improve the growth of the baby in the womb.
Women who were taking daily multivitamins in and around the time of conception gave birth to babies who weighed on average about 540 grams (1.19 pounds) more than babies from women not taking the supplements, reports Heather Burris from Harvard University and Allen Mitchell and Martha Werier from Boston University in the Annals of Epidemiology.
Low birth weight has been linked to higher risks of negative health outcomes, including neonatal and infant mortality, poor growth and cognitive development, and higher risks of chronic diseases later in life, like diabetes and heart disease.
"If our findings were confirmed and subsequently shown to be causal, then increasing peri-conceptional multivitamin use among African-American women in the United States could help to eliminate longstanding disparities in birth weight, gestational age and fetal growth," they added.
Burris and her co-workers analyzed data from 2,331 non-Hispanic white and 133 non-Hispanic black mothers and their infants participating in the Stone Epidemiology Center Birth Defects Study.
While no link was associated between multivitamin use in white women and the birth weight or gestational age of their infants, a significant increase in birth weight was observed in babies from African-American women. Indeed, multivitamin use in African-American women was associated with an increase in birth weight of their infants of 536 grams (1.18 pounds). Furthermore, there was a trend toward increased gestation periods in these women, added the researchers.
Being an epidemiological study, the results do not prove causality and the researchers note that it is possible that multivitamin use is merely indicative of a healthy lifestyle, which would produce healthier pregnancies.
Despite this limitation, Burris and her co-workers note that the findings are "consistent with a plausible role played by micronutrients in fetal growth. It is not known which nutrient or combination of nutrients in multivitamins might affect fetal growth, and our data do not contribute to this question," they added.
Annals of Epidemiology 20(3):233-240, 2010
April 2010
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