Choline during pregnancy impacts children's sustained attention

Date:
January 3, 2022
Source:
Cornell University
Summary:
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 study
has found.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== 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.

"Our findings suggest population-wide benefits of adding choline to a
standard prenatal vitamin regimen," said Barbara Strupp, professor in
the Division of Nutritional Sciences (DNS) and Department of Psychology,
and co-senior author of the study, "Prenatal Choline Supplementation
Improves Child Sustained Attention: A Seven-Year Follow-Up of a Randomized Controlled Feeding Trial," published Dec. 28 in the Journal of the
Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

First author of the study is Charlotte Bahnfleth, Ph.D. '19, a former
graduate student in the Strupp Laboratory. Co-senior author is Richard Canfield, senior research associate in DNS. Marie Caudill, professor in
DNS, was also a co- author.

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.



==========================================================================
In the Cornell 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 a total intake of 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.

"By demonstrating that maternal choline supplementation in humans produces offspring attentional benefits that are similar to those seen in animals," Strupp said, "our findings suggest that the full range of cognitive and neuroprotective benefits demonstrated in rodents may also be seen in
humans." The new findings build on a previous study from this research
group describing benefits during infancy. That study demonstrated that
maternal choline supplementation improved information processing speed throughout the first year of life in these same children.

Few studies with human subjects have evaluated the effect of maternal
choline supplementation and this is the first study to follow the children
to school age.

"By showing that the beneficial effects of prenatal supplementation endure
into childhood, these findings illustrate a role for prenatal choline
in programming the course of child cognitive development," Canfield
said. "And because the ability to sustain attention in challenging
situations is critical to nearly all areas of cognitive performance,
the cumulative impact of improving sustained attention is likely to be substantial." Current recommendations - including those for pregnant
women - were set in 1998 and are based on the amount of choline needed
to prevent liver dysfunction in men, studies have shown.

This research was funded by the National Institute of Food and
Agriculture, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Balchem
Corp. Bahnfleth was supported by an NICHD Traineeship and the Egg
Nutrition Center Young Investigator Research Award for Early Exploration.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Cornell_University. Original written
by Robin Roger.

Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Charlotte L. Bahnfleth, Barbara J. Strupp, Marie A. Caudill,
Richard L.

Canfield. Prenatal choline supplementation improves child
sustained attention: A 7‐year follow‐up of a randomized
controlled feeding trial. The FASEB Journal, 2021; 36 (1) DOI:
10.1096/fj.202101217R ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220103145558.htm
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