Comments on inositol supplementation in pregnancies at risk of apparently folate-resistant NTDs

✍ Scribed by Gary Shaw

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 30 KB
• Volume: 82
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1542-0752
• DOI: 10.1002/bdra.20455

✦ Synopsis

The evidence to support an association between folic acid and reduction of risk for NTD-affected pregnancies is robust. However, whether all NTDs can be prevented via supplementation or fortification with folic acid remains an active and necessary area of inquiry. In this issue of BDRA, Cavalli and colleagues offer some clinical observations that inositol, when administered in combination with 5 mg of folic acid, may reduce the recurrence risk of NTDs in certain women with a history of at least two previous NTD-affected pregnancies. Whether this clinical observation can be replicated in a rigorous study remains an open query. Nevertheless, this observation is intriguing owing to some limited epidemiologic data on inositol (Groenen et al., 2003) as well as data from experimental models with regard to inositol (Greene and Copp, 1997). Thus, inositol certainly earns a spot on a relatively short list of other contenders, such as B 12 , methionine, choline, and zinc (Ray and Blom, 2003;Shaw et al., 1997Shaw et al., , 2004;;Velie et al., 1999), as possible nutrients that deserve far more interrogation for their potential influence on NTD risk.