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Infants whose mothers take vitamin D supplements during pregnancy and newborns who also take it are less likely to get respiratory infections, according to research announced by the University of Auckland Thursday.
The study showed that, in comparison with a placebo group, a group of expecting mothers and newborns taking vitamin D supplements resulted in a smaller proportion of infants making primary care visits for respiratory infections.
The main aim of the trial was to determine the vitamin D dose during pregnancy and infancy was necessary to prevent vitamin D insufficiency during infancy, and the respiratory infection finding came from a secondary analysis.
"This careful and thorough review of the primary care records enabled us to determine that daily vitamin D supplementation given to the mothers during the latter half of pregnancy, and then their infants to age 6 months, resulted in a smaller proportion of infants making any primary care visits for respiratory infections up to age 18 months," study leader Associate Professor Cameron Grant said in a statement.
The research team was now concentrating on determining how vitamin D supplementation could have caused the beneficial effect.
"That the effect of vitamin D persisted after the supplementation was discontinued suggests that vitamin D may have caused some adaptation of the children's immune system that resulted in them either being less susceptible to infection with a respiratory virus or less prone to becoming unwell once infected," he said.
