A recent study has found that a healthy vitamin D status may help combat systemic inflammation in mothers that could otherwise impair the implantation or survival of male fetuses in utero.
 |
| Photo: Vitamin D Sufficiency Helps Mothers During Pregnancy | InStyleHealth |
Experts enrolled 1,191 women attempting pregnancy, in
whom preconception levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin D were measured using
enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays. Primary outcome of interest was offspring gender
ratio, assessed through medical charts.
Average 25 (OH) D level was 30.8+12.2 ng/mL,
with more than half (53%) of the women classified as vitamin D insufficient. A
total of 1,094 livebirths eligible for analysis, including eight twin
gestations.
Those participants who had sufficient pre-pregnancy
levels of serum 25(OH)D were more than 20% likely to give birth to male infants
compared with those whose levels below the referent value.
Vitamin D sufficiency vs insufficiency associated with
5.60 more male infants per 100 women in absolute terms.
As opposed to, Vitamin D status had no clear impact on
the proportion of female births. Samples were stratified according to
pre-pregnancy levels of high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, the researchers found
that the impact of vitamin D status was stronger in women with elevated
inflammation, suggesting that vitamin D could counteract inflammatory
dysregulation in pregnancy that could harm the conception and survival of male
infants.
Additional accounting for pregnancy and live births
did not significantly change the initial findings of the study. According to
the researchers that these findings shed light on the influence of maternal nutrition
on offspring gender ratio in humans and lend additional evidence to the
importance of the health status of women attempting to conceive, for whom
vitamin D and inflammation status could impact the chances of establishing and
maintaining a pregnancy after producing a male conceptus.
Source: Nat Commun 2021;12:2789