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Vitamin D replacement in pregnant women in rural north India: a pilot study

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume 64, pages 914–915 (2010)Cite this article

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The recent on-line publication in EJCN, ‘Vitamin D replacement in pregnant women in rural north India: a pilot study’ (Sahu et al., 2009), does regrettably little to advance our understanding of the safety and efficacy of antenatal vitamin D supplementation. The design of the study overlooked existing knowledge of vitamin D pharmacokinetics. Following a single oral dose of 50 000–100 000 IU vitamin D3, the average 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) concentration rises to a peak within 2 weeks, then gradually declines towards the baseline concentration over a period of about 2 months (Armas et al., 2004; Ilahi et al., 2008). The single dose of 60 000 IU D3 administered by Sahu et al. in the 5th month of gestation would not be expected to have a perceptible effect on 25(OH)D concentrations in most women at delivery, which was the only time at which the biochemical response was assessed. Even the larger doses administered later in pregnancy would have been predicted to have minor effects on the 25(OH)D concentration measured at delivery, despite almost certainly having caused important but undetected elevations in 25(OH)D concentration during the third trimester. Therefore, it is incorrect to conclude from Sahu et al.'s report that the reported supplement regimens had little or no effect on vitamin D status during pregnancy.

The interpretation of the data is further complicated by the unspecified variation in the precise length of the interval between D3 dosing and 25(OH)D measurement among participants. The simple average 25(OH)D concentration at delivery reported by the authors is not a meaningful estimate of a time-dependent biochemical outcome.

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References

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  1. Department of International Health, Program in Human Nutrition, The Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, MD, USA

    D E Roth

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  1. D E Roth
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Correspondence to D E Roth.

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Roth, D. Vitamin D replacement in pregnant women in rural north India: a pilot study. Eur J Clin Nutr 64, 914–915 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ejcn.2010.1

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