Vitamine D belangrijk voor vrouwen in verwachting.*

Volgens de Belgische professor Chantal Mathieu tijdens een congres in Birmingham is voldoende vitamine D voor een vrouw in verwachting heel belangrijk. Dit stimuleert het immuunsysteem en dat is goed voor zowel de vrouw zelf als voor het ongeboren kind. Vrouwen in verwachting kunnen makkelijk een tekort krijgen aan vitamine D en daardoor zelf maar nog meer het ongeboren kind blootstellen aan autoimmuunziektes zoals diabetes of schildklierproblemen. Regelmatig, met verstand, in de zon geeft al veel vitamine D. Zonodig  aan te vullen met supplementen.

Een andere Amerikaanse studie laat zien dat de meeste zwangere vrouwen zelfs zij die regelmatig supplementen nemen te weinig Vitamine D in hun lichaam hebben. Behalve zon, supplementen is voeding rijk aan vitamine D is voor iedere zwangere vrouw heel belangrijk vooral als de zwangerschap  plaatsvindt in de herfst en winter.

Pregnant Women 'Should Supplement Vitamin D'

Pregnant women should take steps to ensure they have adequate vitamin D in their diet, or they and especially their unborn children may run the risk of developing autoimmune diseases such as diabetes and thyroid diseases.
Speaking at the British Endocrine Societies meeting in Birmingham, Dr Chantal Mathieu (University of Leuven, Belgium) said that research had shown that low levels of vitamin D are associated with autoimmune diseases. This is particularly important during pregnancy, when the nutritional requirement of the developing baby means that mothers can easily develop shortages of vitamin D.
In recent work Dr Mathieu has shown that giving vitamin D to mice who would normally develop type 1 diabetes has helped protect them against the onset of the disease.
Vitamin D deficiency is associated with poor bone health and rickets, but much recent work has shown that people with vitamin D deficiency tend to have a poor immune system, and take longer to recover from infections.
Dr Mathieu said
There is now a lot of work showing that vitamin D deficiency is associated with a poor immune system. This makes it difficult to recover from infection, but it also seems to make you more likely to develop autoimmune diseases. Recently we have been able to prevent the development of type 1 diabetes in mice with a predisposition to develop the disease.
Pregnant mothers are particularly liable to develop vitamin D deficiency, and so they are at increased risk of developing autoimmune diseases through being pregnant.
There are two ways of ensuring you have enough vitamin D. You can make sure that you get an adequate amount of sunshine bearing in mind that this has to be done sensibly, because too much sunshine can cause problems such as skin cancer. Or it might be easier simply to take vitamin supplements during pregnancy.
About The SOCIETY FOR ENDOCRINOLOGY
The Society for Endocrinology aims to promote the advancement of public education in endocrinology. The Society was set up in 1946 to promote the advance of endocrinology. The Society currently has about 1900 members and is increasing its size and range of activities rapidly. As well as being the major endocrine society outside North America, the Society is a founder member and organiser of the British Endocrine Societies, to which all the main British endocrine groups are affiliated.
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Vitamin D Deficiency Widespread During Pregnancy

Even regular use of prenatal multivitamin supplements is not adequate to prevent vitamin D insufficiency, University of Pittsburgh researchers report in the current issue of the Journal of Nutrition, the publication of the American Society for Nutrition. A condition linked to rickets and other musculoskeletal and health complications, vitamin D insufficiency was found to be widespread among women during pregnancy, particularly in the northern latitudes.
"In our study, more than 80 percent of African-American women and nearly half of white women tested at delivery had levels of vitamin D that were too low, even though more than 90 percent of them used prenatal vitamins during pregnancy," said Lisa Bodnar, Ph.D., M.P.H., R.D., assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) and lead author of the study. "The numbers also were striking for their newborns - 92.4 percent of African-American babies and 66.1 percent of white infants were found to have insufficient vitamin D at birth."
A vitamin closely associated with bone health, vitamin D deficiency early in life is associated with rickets - a disorder characterized by soft bones and thought to have been eradicated in the United States more than 50 years ago - as well as increased risk for type 1 diabetes, asthma and schizophrenia.
"A newborn's vitamin D stores are completely reliant on vitamin D from the mother," observed Dr. Bodnar, who also is an assistant investigator at the university-affiliated Magee-Womens Research Institute (MWRI). "Not surprisingly, poor maternal vitamin D status during pregnancy is a major risk factor for infant rickets, which again is becoming a major health problem."
For their study, Dr. Bodnar and her colleagues evaluated data that was collected on 200 black women and 200 white women who were randomly selected from more than 2,200 women enrolled in the MWRI's Pregnancy Exposures and Preeclampsia Prevention Study between 1997 and 2001. Samples of maternal blood were collected prior to 22 weeks pregnancy and again just before delivery, Samples of newborn umbilical cord blood also were tested for 25 hydroxyvitamin D, an indicator of vitamin D status. Finding such a proliferation of vitamin D insufficiency in spite of prenatal multivitamin use is troubling, she noted, suggesting that higher dosages, differing vitamin formulations or a moderate increase in sunlight exposure might be necessary to boost vitamin D stores to healthier levels.
"In both groups, vitamin D concentrations were highest in summer and lowest in winter and spring," said senior author James M. Roberts, M.D., MWRI director and professor and vice chair of research in the department of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. "But differences were smaller between seasons for African-American mothers and babies, whose vitamin D deficiency remained more constant."
Since vitamin D is made by the body in reaction to sunlight exposure, it has long been known that vitamin D deficiency is more common among darker-skinned individuals, particularly in more northern latitudes, where less ultraviolet radiation reaches the Earth. Indeed, vitamin D deficiency is more than three times as common in winter than in summer for all women of childbearing age in the United States. Even so, the Pittsburgh researchers' study is cause for concern.
"This study is among the largest to examine these questions in this at-risk population," Marjorie L. McCullough, Sc.D., senior epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society, wrote in an accompanying editorial. "By the end of pregnancy, 90 percent of all women were taking prenatal vitamins and yet deficiency was still common."
Vitamin D is found naturally in fatty fish but few other foods. Primary dietary sources include fortified foods such as milk and some ready-to-eat cereals and vitamin supplements. Sun exposure for skin synthesis of vitamin D also remains critical.
"Our study shows that current vitamin D dietary intake recommendations are not enough to meet the demands of pregnancy," Dr. Bodnar said. "Improving vitamin D status has tremendous capacity to benefit public health." (Maart 2007)  (Opm Meer over vitamine D)