Is the lower serum level of vitamin E associated with pregnant women with allergic rhinitis?

Yiu-Tai Li, Wen-Ling Lee, Peng-Hui Wang

Abstract

It is well known that adequate maintenance or support of nutrition during pregnancy, including essential and trace elements and calorie intake, is a critical dimension not only to maintain peak health and performance of themselves but also for the lifelong health of the offspring.1–7 Malnutrition often results in inadequate protein intake, fewer calories, and deficiency of certain-type essential trace elements. Intake of enough calorie can be easily monitored by measuring gestational weight gain (GWG) in the entire pregnancy period or more accurately estimated by separating GWG according to the different trimesters3; however, it is hard to define whether these pregnant women have adequate dietary intake or meet recommendations for vitamins D, C, A, B complex, K, and E, as well as folate, choline, iron, calcium, potassium, magnesium, zinc, and other essential trace elements (minerals or essential amino acids and so on), partly because of difficulty to measure and monitor these essential trace elements, and partly because of overlooking its important and critical role on both maternal and offspring’s outcome.1,2,4–6 Additionally, these certain-type essential trace elements sometimes make physicians or healthcares confused, based on the presence of multifaced functions of these elements. It has been reported that continuous supplementation of vitamin E throughout offspring lifespan provides beneficial effects to the offspring, but one meta-analysis using experimental models and observational investigations, which are involved with more than 135 000 participants in 19 trials carried out between 1966 and 2004 did not support the above-mentioned findings, based on a significantly increasing mortality from all causes when high dosage vitamin E supplements are given as a supplement throughout their lifespan.

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