Women who take food supplements with iron have a low risk of anemia and the birth of children with underweight.

These facts confirmed a new meta-analysis conducted by Harvard scientists.

Iron intake during pregnancy is associated with a 50% reduction in the risk of anemia and a 19% reduction in the risk of having a baby with a low body weight.

The use of iron supplements during pregnancy also reduces the risk of premature birth by 16%, but the difference has not reached the level of statistical significance. The increase in iron intake for every 10 mg / day is associated with a significant increase in the body weight of newborns and a reduction in the risk of premature birth. These interesting results were obtained by B. Hayder of the Harvard School of Medicine.

More information about the study can be found on the pages of the journal BMJ.

The authors concluded: "The daily intake of iron during pregnancy is related to the weight of the newborns almost linearly. An increase in the hemoglobin level in the mother's blood is also linearly associated with an increase in the body weight of children ".

Iron deficiency is the most common cause of anemia during pregnancy, in many regions of the world iron deficiency is responsible for more than half of the cases of anemia of pregnant women. Clinical studies have shown that iron intake during pregnancy helps to increase hemoglobin levels in mothers, but Western researchers have so far little knowledge of the effect of iron on the outcome of pregnancy.

To clarify the role of dietary supplements with iron during pregnancy, Hayder and his colleagues conducted a meta-analysis of randomized studies that examined the effect of prenatal iron intake on the mother's hemoglobin, fetal health, and others.. They conducted a separate analysis to determine the relationship between anemia of pregnancy and the outcome of pregnancy.

The data for the meta-analysis were taken from the literature for the period from 1966 to 2012. The authors included all studies that examined the effect of pure iron, as well as iron in combination with folic acid, on the level of the hemoglobin of the mother and the outcome of pregnancy. Scientists are faced with the fact that in studies of different ages, researchers have differently defined anemia. The analysis included work where anemia was defined as a hemoglobin level of less than 100 or 115 g / l. When hemoglobin was not indicated, the researchers proceeded from hematocrit.

As a result, the analysis included data from 48 randomized trials, in which 17,773 women participated, as well as 44 cohort studies with 1,851,682 participants.

The results showed that dietary supplements with iron resulted in the following:.

• Increase in hemoglobin by an average of 4.59 g / l compared with the control group.

• Reducing the risk of anemia in the mother by an average of 50% compared with the control group.

• Reduction of the relative risk of iron deficiency in the mother's body by 41%.

• Reducing the relative risk of low birth weight babies by 19%.

The intake of iron by pregnant women was associated with a 16% decrease in the risk of premature birth, but this difference did not reach the level of statistical significance (OR 0.84, 95% CI 0.68-1.03).

Cohort studies showed that anemia in the second and third trimester is associated with a significant increase in the risk of having children with underweight (OR 1.29, 95% CI 1.09-1.53), and premature birth (OR 1.21 at 95% CI 1.13-1.30).

Another analysis showed that every additional 10 mg / day of iron (up to a maximum of 66 mg / day) is associated with a 12% reduction in the risk of anemia in the mother (OR 0.

88, 95% CI 0.84-0.92, P = 0.001). Moreover, every additional 10 mg / day of iron leads to an increase in the average mass of newborns by 15.1 grams (P = 0.005), as well as a 3% decrease in the probability of a child with a low birth weight (P = 0.001).

Another interesting figure: the mass of newborns grows by an average of 14.0 grams with an increase in the hemoglobin level of the mother for every 1 g / l (P = 0.002).

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