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Meer groente en fruit voor a.s. moeders ter voorkoming van leukemie bij baby.*
Nieuw
onderzoek legt een link tussen verhoogde kans op kinder leukemie en voeding vóór
de zwngerschap. Het eten van meer groente en fruit verminderde het risico op een
baby die leukemie krijgt duidelijk. Belangrijk was daarbij de rol die Glutathion
speelt in de verkleining van het risico op kanker.
New
Research Suggests Link Between Maternal Diet and Childhood Leukemia Risk
A
new study suggests that eating more vegetables, fruit and protein before
pregnancy may lower the risk of having a child who develops leukemia, the most
common childhood cancer in the United States.
"This
is the first time researchers have conducted a systematic survey of a woman's
diet and linked it to the risk of childhood leukemia," said Dr. Kenneth
Olden, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the
federal agency that funded the study. NIEHS is a component of the National
Institutes of Health.
The
study was conducted by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley,
and the study results are published in the August 2004 issue of Cancer Causes
and Control.
Researchers
compared 138 women who each had a child diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic
leukemia (ALL) with a control group of 138 women whose children did not have
cancer. The children of all the women in the study were matched by sex, age,
race, and county of residence at birth.
After
comparing the women's diets in the 12 months prior to pregnancy, researchers
found that the higher the intake of vegetables, fruit and foods in the protein
group, the lower the risk of having a child with leukemia.
One
of the more surprising results of the study is the emergence of protein sources,
such as beef and beans, as a beneficial food group in lowering childhood
leukemia risk. "The health benefits of fruits and vegetables have been
known for a long time," said principal investigator Gladys Block, professor
of epidemiology and public health nutrition at U.C. Berkeley. "What we
found in this study is that the protein foods group is also very
important."
The
researchers looked further and found that glutathione was the nutrient in the
protein group with a strong link to lower cancer risk. Glutathione is an
antioxidant found in both meat and legumes, and it plays a role in the synthesis
and repair of DNA, as well as the detoxification of certain harmful compounds.
Within
the fruit and vegetable food groups, certain foods - including carrots, string
beans and cantaloupe - stood out as having stronger links to lower childhood
leukemia risk. The researchers point to the benefits of nutrients, such as
carotenoids, in those foods as potential protective factors. National guidelines
recommend that people eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every
day, and two to three servings of foods from the protein group.
"Fetal
exposure to nutritional factors has a lot to do with what mom eats," said
Christopher Jensen, a nutritional epidemiologist at U.C. Berkeley and lead
author of the paper. "These findings show how vital it is that women hoping
to get pregnant, as well as expectant moms, understand that critical nutrients
in vegetables, fruit and foods containing protein, such as meat, fish, beans and
nuts, may protect the health of their unborn children."
The
few studies that have been conducted on maternal diet and childhood cancer risk
looked only at specific foods or supplements, and results have been mixed. This
study is the first attempt to capture a woman's overall dietary pattern - using
a 76-food-item questionnaire - and its relationship to the development of
leukemia in a child. Researchers also studied the use of vitamin supplements,
but did not find a statistically significant link to childhood leukemia risk.
A growing number of scientists believe that genetic changes linked to cancer later in life begin in the womb. "It goes back to the old saying to expectant mothers, 'You're eating for two,'" said co-author Patricia Buffler, U.C. Berkeley professor of epidemiology and head of the federally funded Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study. "We're starting to see the importance of the prenatal environment, since the events that may lead to leukemia are possibly initiated in utero. Leukemia is a very complex disease with multiple risk factors. What these findings show is that the nutritional environment in utero could be one of those factors."