Relation between Folic Acid and Neural Tube Defect
Insufficiency of folate during early pregnancy is associated with increased risk of birth defects. Women of a particularly poor population subgroup manifested severe anemia during pregnancy, early abortions, and malformed births. The vitamin folate has been discovered and purified in 1945, during the first 2 decades after folate discovery, large doses of folic acid have been used to correcting anaemia and/or neurological manifestations. (
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Neural tube defects (NTDs) are common complex congenital malformations resulting from failure of the neural tube closure during embryogenesis, a lot of studies established that folic acid supplementation decreases the prevalence of NTDs, this report summarizes some of these studies, which have led to the current situation in which all women capable of becoming pregnant should consume 400 micrograms of folic acid/day for the purpose of reducing this risk. The folate-NTD relation represents the only instance in which a congenital malformation can be prevented simply and consistently. Nevertheless, several research gaps remain: identification of the mechanism by which the defect occurs and how folate ameliorates it, characterization of the relative efficacy of food folate, folic acid added to foods, and folic acid by itself; delineation of the dose-response relations of folate and NTD prevention
