Some infertile women could improve their chances of having children by taking multivitamin tablets, research in the US has suggested.
The dietary supplements can protect against failure to ovulate, according to a Harvard Medical School study of 18,000 nurses over eight years. Women who took multivitamins six times a week were 40 per cent less likely to fail to ovulate than those who took none. Less frequent use had a smaller effect. Ovulation failure affects 8.4 per cent of those in Britain who have problems conceiving.
Jorge Chavarro, who led the study, told the American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference in New Orleans that the beneficial effects seemed to derive from folic acid, which helps to prevent birth defects: “I don’t think I could say ‘use vitamins to prevent infertility’, but using vitamins is unlikely to have a detrimental effect. If a woman is thinking about becoming pregnant, she should be thinking about taking folic acid and it would be reasonable to consider a multivitamin.”
No comments:
Post a Comment