Pick up sweet potato when pregnant

Increasing Vitamin B3 — found in avocados, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, among others — in pregnant women diets lower the rates of birth defects in infants, a new study has shown.

The study, first published in The New England Journal of Medicine, revealed that the vitamin also known as niacin can prevent miscarriages and help compensate for defects in the body’s ability to make a molecule, called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD).

Researchers linked NAD to healthy fetal development in humans.

According to the study, the extra dose of Vitamin B3 could prevent women from getting Pellagra, a disease caused by a deficiency of the vitamin.

Vitamin B3 deficiency may cause depression and neurasthenia (weakening of muscles) which is very dangerous in pregnant women. Every year 7.9 million babies worldwide are born with defects, according to the World Health Organisation.

The study done by researchers in Australia and released last week revealed that they started the research by studying genes that cause heart defects in infants.

Sally Dunwoodie, a developmental geneticist at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, Australia, and her colleagues studied the genes that influence heart development and for years, they have connected them with families of children born with heart problems.

“We started with a child who had a severe case. The baby had major defects in the heart, backbone, and ribs. The ribs were so severe that the child’s lungs couldn’t fully inflate,” she said.

The team found that the family carried a mutation in a gene related to the production of NAD, a molecule crucial for energy storage and DNA synthesis in cells.

Both parents carried a mutation in one of their copies of the gene, and the affected baby had inherited two defective copies from parents.

According to Paul Mitei, a Kisumu-based gynaecologist, Vitamin B3 aids in the development of baby’s brain, keeping the nervous system and skin healthy.

“It also improves digestion, eases nausea and can relieve painful migraines,” said Dr Mitei.

He said if a pregnant mother does not want to take the Vitamin B3 supplement, she can as well eat foods rich in the vitamin.

The foods include chicken breast, peanuts, mushrooms, turkey meat, peas, sunflower seeds, avocados, tomatoes, brown rice and sweet potato.

To further confirm the study and role of the mutation in organ and bone development, the researchers fed pregnant mutant mice a diet without the vitamin.

“Many pups died in utero, and those that survived had defects that closely resembled those seen in the child,” she said. Giving the mutant pregnant mice low doses of the vitamin led to pups with less severe defects, and rich diet allowed the mutant mice to give birth to healthy litters,” she said.

The study suggests that B3 supplements might help families with mutations in NAD-related genes, by preventing birth defects or perhaps even by treating already affected children.

Studies needed before doctors could recommend B3 supplements for pregnant women, says Matthew Vander Heiden, who studies the role of NAD in cancer biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The researchers aren’t sure exactly how NAD levels affect development because the molecule plays a key role in so many different cell functions.

It might be that cells without enough NAD don’t have enough energy to keep up with the fast pace of cell growth and division that development requires. The molecule also helps cells respond to certain kinds of stress.

“We suspect that NAD plays a big role in DNA synthesis and repair might be especially important. They note that patients with Fanconi anaemia, a disease in which DNA breaks easily, often have birth defects similar to those seen in the families in the study,” said Dr Dunwoodie.

Dr Dunwoodie says she has counted at least 95 genes that are involved in NAD levels in the body. It’s possible that mutations in any of those could leave a developing fetus vulnerable to birth defects, even if neither parent has any obvious symptoms. Extra vitamin B3 in a mother’s diet might help compensate for any of the faulty genes, she says.