Choline during pregnancy impacts children’s sustained attention

 

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/939150

 

 News Release 3-Jan-2022
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Cornell University

 

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, a new Cornell study has found.

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.

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 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 using rodent models 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.

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