Childhood obesity risk & folic acid

VITAL SIGNS

Pregnant women should take folic acid, a Vitamin B, during pregnancy, to prevent neural tube defects in their babies. Now a new study, in JAMA Pediatrics, has found that sufficient folic acid during pregnancy may reduce the risk for obesity in children.

Researchers studied 1,517 mother-child pairs, measuring the mothers’ folic acid blood levels at delivery and following the children through an average age of six.

After controlling for other variables in both mother and child, they found that compared with those mothers who had folic acid levels in the highest three-quarters, those with levels in the lowest one-quarter had a 45% higher risk for obesity in their children.

Folic acid may be especially beneficial for obese mothers. Among obese mothers with the lowest folic acid levels, the risk of obesity in their children more than tripled.

But in children of obese mothers, the risk for obesity was 43% lower if their mothers were in the top three-quarters for folic acid levels. Experts advise that all pregnant women take a 400-mg supplement of folic acid daily.

But the senior author, Dr Xiaobin Wang, a paediatrician at Johns Hopkins, said there was no perfect correlation between the supplement dose and blood levels.