Blood folic acid and vitamin B12 in relation to neural tube defects.

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial looks at Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12).

To determine the relation between blood folic acid and serum vitamin B12 in neural tube defect pregnancies using data from the MRC Vitamin Study and a literature review of all studies.

Who Took Part

PubMed tags the participants as women only.

The samples had been collected from women at entry to the trial, immediately before the women became pregnant, and at around 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Their results were combined with those already published from other studies to obtain an overall assessment of blood folic acid and vitamin B12 in relation to neural tube defects.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized.

Because people in this Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Four controls were matched with each case by centre, maternal age and duration of storage of the blood sample.

Blood samples were collected as part of the MRC Vitamin Study.

The collaborating centres were in the United Kingdom, Hungary, Israel, Australia, Canada and Russia.

Twenty-seven women with neural tube defect pregnancies and 108 matched controls with unaffected pregnancies.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Folic Acid, Neural Tube Defects, Risk Factors and Vitamin B 12.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12).

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 1996 (British journal of obstetrics and gynaecology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12) compound page, all human trials.