Cognitive gains from multivitamins depend on pregnancy diet

Cognitive gains from multivitamins depend on pregnancy diet

New research shows that expectant mothers taking multivitamins can support a child's brain development, but only if their diet isn't doing the work.

Study:Maternal quality of diet and multivitamin intake during pregnancy interact in association with neurodevelopment of offspring at age 2 years. Photo credit: Nemer-t/Shutterstock.com

During pregnancy, the mother's diet influences the development of the fetal brain. A recently published study inNutrientsExamined how diet quality interacts with multivitamin use in pregnancy to influence brain development in offspring after two years.

introduction

The brain grows and develops rapidly during the first thousand days of life. This crucial time is the basis for further neurological development throughout the entire life cycle. Nutritional deficiencies during this period could thus impact academic performance and lifelong health.

For this reason, pregnant women should follow a diet that meets evidence-based guidelines. Multivitamins can bridge the gap when the mother cannot afford or access healthy foods. In fact, free multivitamins are provided to socioeconomically disadvantaged pregnant women in Quebec.

However, the effects of interactions of maternal quality and vitamin supplementation on neurodevelopment in children remain to be measured. While previous research shows that high maternal quality is associated with better intelligence and cognitive abilities in offspring, multivitamin supplementation in one study did not reflect better cognitive performance. This could be because high diet quality may reduce the observable effects of the multivitamins.

The current study aimed to explain this by analyzing the interaction between these factors.

About the study

Study data came from the 3D cohort study in Quebec, Canada, including 1,535 mother-child pairs. Maternal food consumption was recorded with a three-day food record between 20 and 24 weeks of pregnancy. Diet quality assessment followed a healthy eating index adapted for Canada (HEI-C) and was classified as high or low in a binary manner depending on the median. The child's cognitive and language development as well as motor skills were assessed after two years.

Study results

Women with high diet quality tended to be older and college educated with better income and healthier body weight compared to those with low diet quality. Women who took multivitamins were less likely to smoke during pregnancy than non-users.

Approximately 60% of women who did not take multivitamins had low diet quality, compared to 50% of multivitamin users. Most multivitamin users took them daily, with less than 2% using them three times a week or less.

After adjusting for multiple variables, investigators found that for women with a poor diet, multivitamin use was not associated with the lowest cognitive and language outcomes among offspring. Multivitamin use was associated with a modest, statistically significant three-point improvement in cognitive scores. However, this change may not reflect a major clinical effect. Speech scores did not improve significantly with multivitamin use and a poor diet.

Among women with high-quality diets, non-multivitamin users had children with higher cognitive and language scores. However, multivitamin use did not alter cognitive or language scores when the mother had a good diet.

Motor skills in the offspring did not reflect interactions between diet quality and multivitamin intake in the mothers. This is probably because motor skills are mainly acquired after birth, depending on childhood nutrition and physical activity.

These results suggest that the micronutrients in multivitamins have a greater impact on child neurological development when used by women with multiple deficiencies due to their poor diet.

In contrast, the offspring of women with a good diet are unlikely to receive additional benefits from the vitamins because their nutritional needs are already met. Women who can afford and have access to a healthy diet often also have a healthy lifestyle in other ways, further ensuring proper neurodevelopment and reducing the role of the multivitamin supplement.

Brain development also depends on delivery time, birth weight and the child's diet after birth. Previous research suggests that proper nutrition during pregnancy can reduce the risk of preterm birth, low birth weight, and low gestational age. These factors can interact to ensure a better development path. However, due to limited statistical power, the study could not formally determine whether such postnatal or birth-related variables mediated the observed effects.

Conclusions

The results show that diet quality and multivitamin during pregnancy at two years of age influence the cognitive and language development of the offspring. High diet quality improved these developmental areas when multivitamin supplements were not used, but not otherwise.

Similarly, multivitamin use improved cognitive development in children when maternal diet quality was poor, but not in women with high-quality diets. Mothers who had poor diets and didn't use multivitamins had children with the lowest cognitive and language development scores.

These results emphasize that “Adequate nutritional support during pregnancy, achieved either through a high-quality diet or multivitamin supplementation, is fundamental for children's neurological development. “”

Further studies are needed to validate this conclusion and target women with poor quality diets who are not on multivitamins for nutritional interventions. The study authors also suggest that multivitamin supplements may not provide additional benefits in women with already high diet quality because their nutritional needs are likely already being met through diet.

Download your PDF copy now!

Sources: