Maternal intake of choline during pregnancy impacts children's sustained attention (Seven years later)

Medical Xpress / Cornell University / The FASEB Journal ^ | Jan. 4, 2022 | Charlotte Bahnfleth, Ph.D. et al

[ConservativeMind]

Seven-year-old children performed better on a challenging task requiring sustained attention if their mothers consumed twice the recommended amount of choline during their pregnancy.

The study, which compared these children with those whose mothers had consumed the recommended amount of choline, suggests that the recommended choline intake for expectant mothers does not fully meet the needs of the fetal brain.

"Our findings suggest population-wide benefits of adding choline to a standard prenatal vitamin regimen," said Barbara Strupp, professor.

Choline—found in egg yolks, lean red meat, fish, poultry, legumes, nuts and cruciferous vegetables—is absent from most prenatal vitamins, and more than 90% of expectant mothers consume less than the recommended amount.

Several decades of research has shown that adding extra choline to the maternal diet produces long term cognitive benefits for the offspring. In addition to improving offspring attention and memory throughout life, maternal choline supplementation in rodents has proven to be neuroprotective for the offspring by mitigating the cognitive adversities caused by prenatal stress, fetal alcohol exposure, autism, epilepsy, Down syndrome and Alzheimer's disease.

In the study, all women consumed a prepared diet with a specified amount of choline throughout the third trimester of pregnancy. One half of these women consumed 480 mg choline per day, which slightly exceeds the recommended adequate intake (AI) level of 450 mg/day. The other half consumed 930 mg choline per day, approximately double the AI level.

When tested at 7 years of age, the children of women in the 480 mg/day group showed a decline in accuracy from the beginning to the end of a sustained attention task, while those from the 930 mg/day group maintained a high level of accuracy throughout the task. These findings parallel the effects of maternal choline supplementation and deprivation in rodents, using a closely analogous sustained attention task.

[ConservativeMind]

Egg yolks are a major source of choline (147 mg).

One would probably need supplements of lecithin or other choline sources to get to 930 mg a day.

My wife and I use lecithin, CDP Choline, and Alpha-GPC.

[ConservativeMind]

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[Arcadian Empire]

Choline helps with memory as well as other things.

[House Atreides]

Wow, a “Randomized Controlled Feeding Trial”. They should have more such trials of nutrition components and results of fetal development. I wonder if they also tested IQs of the 7-year olds.