KARACHI, March 15: Women should take a vitamin containing 400mg of folic acid each day during pregnancy in order to reduce the risk of a birth defect called spina bifida in their babies.

A new study provides another reason for women to take vitamins, says a report by the National Institute of Child Health (NICH), Karachi. Women who took multivitamins before becoming pregnant or during the first month of pregnancy are less likely to have babies with heart defects.

The report found risk reduction among women who started using multivitamins before conception and adds that it did not find a risk reduction among women who started consuming the same in the third month of pregnancy.

The lack of an effect later in pregnancy suggests that most heart defects occur as the fetus develops in the first month of pregnancy. This makes sense, it says, since the heart begins breathing about 28 days into pregnancy. The report highlights the need to take early steps to prevent birth defects.

The investigations based the findings on 958 children with heart defects and 329 healthy children born in the city between 1992 to 1999.

Children whose mothers took multivitamins before pregnancy or during the first month after the conception had a 20 per cent lower risk of being born with a heart defect.—PPI