Research On The Link Maternal Nutrition / Prematurity

Educated as an OB-GYN. I practiced this specialty for 30 years in Antwerp, Belgium. While monitoring pregnancies and delivering babies, I was asking myself. if there could be a link between the nutritional condition of the mother and the term of her pregnancy, more precisely if nutritional deficiencies before and during pregnancy could be added to the factors with a positive correlation to prematurity.
Since most women in my practice were taking supplements during their pregnancy and that some of them still had premature babies, I was particularly interested in finding out if supplementing before pregnancy would help reduce the occurrence of prematurity.
It was impossible to ask volunteers to take supplements during a certain period of time and then -- just then -- to start a pregnancy. Very fortunately, there was a way around this. I had for years been adding minerals and vitamins to my prescriptions for all kinds of health conditions, ranging from fatigue and depression to amenorrhea, PMS, and sterility.
35 patients following these prescriptions happened to become pregnant during their treatment. All I had to do was to ask them to stick to the treatment during the pregnancy. (For the control group, I selected the files of each patient giving birth immediately after the delivery of a patient from the first group)

In the following charts the horizontal line indicates the duration of the pregnancy expressed in weeks. The vertical line indicates the weight in pounds of the babies at birth.

Chart 1: The Outcome of 35 pregnancies in women that were taking minerals and vitamin supplements during a period of time of at least three months before becoming pregnant. 31 deliveries occurred after 40 weeks of pregnancy, and 4 deliveries after 39 weeks. There are no premature infants. Two babies are underweight.

Chart 2: The outcome of 35 pregnancies in women that were taking minerals and vitamins supplements after becoming pregnant only. In contrast to the first group, there are 4 deliveries after 39 weeks, 5 after 38 weeks, 1 after 34 weeks, 3 after 41 weeks and 5 babies are underweight.

More Interesting Information
More interesting is the fact that in the group of the 35 prepared pregnancies, there were 19 women that already had children. Together the 19 mothers had 24 children born from a previous unprepared pregnancy. Chart 3 indicates the outcome of the 19 prepared pregnancies, chart 4 the outcome of the 24 unprepared previous pregnancies.

Chart 3: The outcome of 19 pregnancies in women that had been taking minerals and vitamins supplements during a period of time of at least three months before becoming pregnant. There were 16 deliveries after 40 weeks and 3 after 39 weeks. All babies are of normal weight.

Chart 4: The outcome of 24 previous unprepared pregnancies in the women of chart 3. In contrast to chart 3, there were 4 deliveries after 38 weeks and 3 babies are underweight.

Several mothers that had children of previous unprepared pregnancies noticed that their last baby -- the one from the prepared pregnancy -- was in better condition than their sibling or siblings.

NOTES:
1 - In 1984 there were no other publications supporting the hypothesis of a link between the nutritional condition of the mother before and during pregnancy and prematurity. 165 papers published around that time focus only on  diseases in premature babies, like thyroid hormone deficiency (Deckers 1977) and  copper deficiency (Blumenthal, 1980)
2 - One as to wait more than ten years to find other publications about prematurity and deficiencies. Among them: Deficiency in Iodine (Rooman, 1996) (Krassas, 2000), magnesium (Villar 1998), vit B12 and folate (Rosenblatt, 1999), copper (Beshgetoor, 1998), calcium (Bakstroom, 2000). selenium (Winterbourn, 2000) and Iron (Yeo, 2001) (Bader, 2001).
3 - Recently two large studies (2005 and 2008), both published in the Lancet confirm the usefulness of supplements, minerals and vitamins to improve the health of a newborn and to avoid prematurity and intra-uterine growth retardation.

For the scientific evidence behind the results, see the Rational, for the details see the recommendations,