Vitamin D supplementation in pregnancy: a systematic review.

What It Covers

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as a systematic review.

To answer the following questions: (1) What are the clinical criteria for vitamin D deficiency in pregnant women?

Why It Was Studied

Either assessment of vitamin D status [dietary intake, sunlight exposure, circulating 25(OH)D concentration] or supplementation of participants with vitamin D or food containing vitamin D (e.g. oily fish).

Study methodology varied widely in terms of study design, population used, vitamin D status assessment, exposure measured and outcome definition.

Who the Included Studies Covered

PubMed tags the participants as women only.

Major electronic databases [including Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects (DARE), Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (CRD), Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (CDSR) and the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) database] were searched from inception up to June 2012 covering both published and grey literature.

Pregnant women or pregnant women and their offspring.

How the Review Was Done

The researchers performed a systematic review and where possible combined study results using meta-analysis to estimate the combined effect size.

Bibliographies of selected papers were hand-searched for additional references.

Relevant authors were contacted for any unpublished findings and additional data if necessary.

Abstracts were reviewed by two reviewers.

What Was Measured

Either assessment of vitamin D status [dietary intake, sunlight exposure, circulating 25(OH)D concentration] or supplementation of participants with vitamin D or food containing vitamin D (e.g. oily fish).

Study methodology varied widely in terms of study design, population used, vitamin D status assessment, exposure measured and outcome definition.

PubMed files the paper under topics including Birth Weight, Dietary Supplements, Pregnancy Complications, Pregnancy Outcome, Vitamin D, Vitamin D Deficiency and Vitamins.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a systematic review of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 8 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2014 (Health technology assessment (Winchester, England)), a journal based in England.

More context: the Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc compound page, all human trials.