Seven-year-old children perform better cognitively when their mothers are there during thePregnancy supplementsor eat foods with choline. This comes from a new study in which the authors examined the fetal brain's need for vitamins. Accordingly, the research suggests the potential benefits of adding choline to standard prenatal vitamin therapy.
How foods containing choline and such supplements affect the fetus
Choline is mainly found in egg yolks, lean red meat, fish, poultry, legumes, nuts and cruciferous vegetables. However, it is not present in most prenatal vitamins. In addition, more than 90% of expectant mothers consume less than the recommended amount. Several decades of research using animal models have shown that adding additional choline to the maternal diet has long-term cognitive benefits for offspring. In addition to improving offspring attention and memory throughout life, maternal choline supplementation in rodents has been shown to be neuroprotective for offspring. This alleviates the cognitive adversities caused by prenatal stress, fetal alcohol exposure, autism, epilepsy, Down syndrome and Alzheimer's disease. The new study results correspond to the effects of supplementation and withdrawal in rodents, where the researchers used a very analogous sustained attention task.
The research shows that the full range of cognitive and neuroprotective benefits seen in rodents are also seen in humans. Only a few human studies have examined the effects of choline during pregnancy. Additionally, this is the first research analysis that followed children up to school age. By demonstrating that the beneficial effects of prenatal supplementation persist into childhood, these results illustrate a role for prenatal choline in programming the course of children's cognitive development. The ability to maintain attention in challenging situations is crucial for almost all areas of cognitive performance. Therefore, the new findings couldthis studymake a significant contribution to improving children's cognitive function.
