Prenatal intake of vitamins and allergic outcomes in the offspring

Vahdaninia, M., MacKenzie, Heather, Helps, Suzannah and Dean, Tara (2017) Prenatal intake of vitamins and allergic outcomes in the offspring. The Journal of Allergy and Clinical immunology: In Practice, 5 (3), 771-778. (doi:10.1016/j.jaip.2016.09.024).

Abstract

Background - Allergic diseases have seen a rise worldwide with children suffering the highest burden. Thus early prevention of allergic diseases is a public health priority. Objective - To synthesise the evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) assessing the efficacy of vitamin interventions during pregnancy on developing allergic diseases in offspring. Methods - We searched CENTRAL, MEDLINE, SCOPUS, WHO’s Int. Clin. Trials Reg., E-theses and Web of Science. Study quality was evaluated using the Cochrane’s risk of bias tool. Included RCTs had a minimum of 1-month follow-up post gestation.Results - A total of five RCTs met the inclusion criteria, including 2456 children that used vitamins C+E (one study), vitamin C (one study) and vitamin D (three studies) compared with placebo/control. Two studies were judged to have a high risk of bias for performance bias or high rate of loss to follow-up. All were rated as low risk of bias for blinding of outcome assessment. We did not perform meta-analysis with vitamin C or C+E studies due to high heterogeneity between the two included studies. However we did conduct a meta-analysis with trials on vitamin D (including 1493 children) and the results showed an association between prenatal intake of vitamin D and the risk of developing recurrent wheeze in offspring (RR=0.812, 95 % CI=0.67-0.98). Conclusion - The current evidence suggests that prenatal supplementation of vitamin D, might have a beneficial effect on recurrent wheezing in children. Longer-term follow-up of these studies are needed to ascertain whether this observed effect is a sustained. There is lack of evidence on the effect of other vitamins for prevention of respiratory and/or allergic outcomes.

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Contributors

Author: Heather MacKenzie

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