Adding choline to your diet during pregnancy can improve your child’s sustained attention.health

According to a new study from Cornell University, a 7-year-old child performed better on difficult tasks that required sustained attention if the mother took twice the recommended amount of choline during pregnancy. ..

The findings were published in the Federation of American Societies of Experimental Biology.

A study comparing these children with those whose mother consumed the recommended amount ColinSuggests that the recommended choline intake for pregnant mothers does not fully meet the needs of the fetal brain.

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“Our findings suggest the benefits of adding choline to standard prenatal vitamin therapy for the entire population,” said a professor of nutrition science (DNS) and psychology, of the study. Co-lead author Barbara Strap said. Supplements improve children’s sustained attention: a 7-year follow-up of a randomized, controlled feeding test’.

The first authors of this study are Charlotte Bahnfleth, PhD. Former graduate student at Strupp Laboratory in ’19. The co-lead author is Richard Canfield, a senior researcher at DNS. Marie Caudill, a professor of DNS, was also a co-author.

Colin-found in egg yolk, Lean lean meat, fish, chicken, legumes, nuts, brassicaceae vegetables are not found in most prenatal vitamins, and more than 90% of pregnant mothers are above recommended amounts It consumes a small amount.

Decades of research using a rodent model have shown that adding choline to the mother’s diet provides long-term cognitive benefits to offspring.

In addition to improving offspring attention and memory throughout life, maternal cholinergic supplementation in rodents is a cognitive adversity caused by prenatal stress, fetal alcohol exposure, autism, epilepsy, Down’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. It has been proven to neuroprotect the offspring by alleviating.

In a Cornell University study, all women ate a prepared diet containing a certain amount of choline throughout late pregnancy. Half of these women consumed 480 mg of choline per day. This is slightly above the recommended proper intake (AI) level of 450 mg / day. The other half consumed 930 mg of choline per day, about twice the AI ​​level.

When tested at age 7, female children in the 480 mg / day group showed reduced inaccuracies from start to finish in the sustained attention task, while children in the 930 mg / day group maintained high levels. The accuracy of the entire task. These findings parallel the effects of maternal choline supplementation and deprivation in rodents using closely similar sustained attention tasks.

“By demonstrating that maternal choline supplementation produces the same progeny attention benefits as those found in animals, our findings show that the full range of cognitive and neuroprotective benefits exhibited in rodents. It suggests that it may also be seen in humans. “

The new findings are based on previous studies from this research group explaining the benefits of infancy. The study showed that maternal choline supplementation improved information processing rates throughout the first year of life for these same children.

Few studies have evaluated the effects of maternal choline supplementation in humans, and this is the first study to follow children to school age.

“By demonstrating that the beneficial effects of prenatal supplements last into childhood, these findings demonstrate the role of prenatal choline in programming the process of cognitive development in children,” says Canfield. I did. “And since the ability to maintain attention in difficult situations is important for almost all areas of cognitive ability, the cumulative impact of improving sustained attention can be significant. “

Current recommendations, including pregnant women, were set in 1998 and studies have shown that they are based on the amount of choline needed to prevent liver dysfunction in men.

This study was funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which is part of the United States Department of Agriculture, and Balchem ​​Corp. Bahnfleth was supported by the NICHD Trainingeeship and the Egg Nutrition Center Young Investigator Research Award for Early Exploration.