Egypt has a high incidence of neural tube defects. Folic acid supplementation in the periconceptional period is known to lower the risk of such defects. This cross-sectional study aimed to measure the level of knowledge about periconceptional folic acid use among pregnant women attending for antenatal care at Ain Shams University Hospital, Cairo, Egypt in 2012. Questionnaires were filled throug...

BACKGROUND The risk of recurrent neural-tube defects is decreased in women who take folic acid or multivitamins containing such during the periconceptional period. The extent to which folic acid supplementation can reduce the first occurrence of defects is not known. METHODS We conducted a randomized, controlled trial of periconceptional multivitamin supplementation to test the efficacy of th...

Intrauterine exposures mediated by maternal diet may affect risk of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. Recent evidence, primarily from animal studies and observational data in humans, suggests that the epigenome can be altered by maternal diet during the periconceptional period and that these programming events may underlie later disease risk. A randomized controlled trial of...

BACKGROUND Most reproductive failures originate during the periconceptional period and are influenced by the age and the lifestyle of parents-to-be. We advance the hypothesis that these failures can arise as a partial consequence of derangements to one-carbon (1-C) metabolism (i.e. metabolic pathways that utilize substrates/cofactors such as methionine, vitamin B12, folate). 1-C metabolic pathw...

BACKGROUND Nonsyndromic cleft lip with or without cleft palate (CL/P) or cleft palate only (CPO) are orofacial clefts and have a multifactorial etiology. The identification of amendable parental risk factors may contribute to a reduced occurrence of these malformations in the future. METHODS Standardized demographic and periconceptional exposure data from 284 parents of a child with CL/P, 66 ...

BACKGROUND Few epidemiological studies have explored the relationship between orofacial clefts and bronchodilators. We assessed whether mothers who used bronchodilators during early pregnancy were at an increased risk of delivering infants with orofacial clefts. METHODS We used National Birth Defects Prevention Study case-control data from mothers of 2711 infants with orofacial clefts and 648...

The conclusion of a report recently published by EUROCAT is that the potential for preventing neural tube defects with periconceptional folic acid supplementation is still far from being fulfilled in Europe. A number of recommendations to increase periconceptional folate status are made. In Denmark less than 20% of pregnant women follow the official recommendations on periconceptional folic aci...