Vitamin D supplementation for women during pregnancy.

What It Covers

The paper reports a study of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc, published as a meta-analysis.

Vitamin D deficiency or insufficiency is thought to be common among pregnant women.

Randomised and quasi-randomised trials with randomisation at either individual or cluster level, evaluating the effect of supplementation with vitamin D alone or in combination with other micronutrients for women during pregnancy.

Who the Included Studies Covered

PubMed tags the participants as women only.

The researchers searched the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group's Trials Register (23 February 2015), the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (31 January 2015), the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (28 January 2015) and also contacted relevant organisations (31 January 2015).

How the Review Was Done

The quality of the evidence was assessed using the GRADE approach.

What Was Measured

Randomised and quasi-randomised trials with randomisation at either individual or cluster level, evaluating the effect of supplementation with vitamin D alone or in combination with other micronutrients for women during pregnancy.

Two review authors independently i) assessed the eligibility of studies against the inclusion criteria ii) extracted data from included studies, and iii) assessed the risk of bias of the included studies.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Calcium, Dietary, Pregnancy Complications, Pregnancy Outcome, Premature Birth, Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic, Vitamin D and Vitamin D Deficiency.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a meta-analysis of Vitamin D, K2, Magnesium and Zinc.

Results are reported in around 20 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2016 (The Cochrane database of systematic reviews), a journal based in England.

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