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(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Pregnant women in the United States regularly receive multivitamin supplements to ensure adequate nutrition for themselves and their babies.
The same is needed around the world, report Harvard researchers who teamed up with investigators in Tanzania to study the impact of daily vitamin supplements on pregnant women who tested negative for HIV.
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The researchers had previously found adding a multivitamin to iron and folate supplementation in HIV positive women resulted in better pregnancy outcomes and wanted to see if the same would be true for HIV negative women.
It was. Women who received the multivitamin supplement were about 18-percent less likely to have a low-birthweight baby and about 23-percent less likely to have a baby who was smaller than expected at the time of delivery than women assigned to take a placebo pill for comparison purposes.
Noting most developing nations already have a system in place to provide iron and folate supplements to pregnant women, and adding a multivitamin would only cost about 20- percent more, the authors write, "In light of these benefits and the low cost of the supplements, multivitamins should be considered for all pregnant women."
How much money are we talking about? Because the cost of the current supplements is only about a dollar per pregnancy, adding a multivitamin to the mix would cost only about 20 cents more.
The study involved nearly 8,500 women who began taking the supplements when they were between 12 and 27 weeks pregnant. The multivitamin used in the study contained vitamins C, E, and B-complex.
This article was reported by Ivanhoe.com, which offers Medical Alerts by e-mail every day of the week. To subscribe, click on: http://www.ivanhoe.com/newsalert/.
SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine, 2007;356:1423-1431
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