‘Breakthrough’ finding stops miscarriages, birth defects

Bringing a child into the world is filled with lots of joy and excitement… along with a giant dose of fear and anxiety.

And if you or someone you love is expecting, you know firsthand that a lot of that anxiety centers around two big worries — miscarriages and birth defects.

But what if it was possible for a simple vitamin to prevent a major cause of serious birth defects as well as untold numbers of miscarriages?

Australian researchers have made a discovery that is so important that everyone — obstetricians, nurses, midwives, moms, dads, grandparents — ought to hear about it right now!

The power of B
It’s not often that a study is called a “historic medical breakthrough.”

Yet that’s exactly how this new research was described by the health minister of Australia — where up to 20 percent of pregnancies end in a miscarriage and three percent of infants are born with a major birth defect.

Think that’s bad? Those same statistics are true of pregnancies in the U.S. as well.

But what they found, according to Sally Dunwoodie, one of the researchers, actually has the potential to “significantly reduce the number of miscarriages and birth defects around the world.”

And those findings didn’t just happen overnight — they are the result of 12 years of research.

The Australian team was inspired to do this new study by earlier research out of the New Jersey Medical School that found during the first three months of pregnancy — a vital time when a baby’s organs start to develop — it’s very common for a woman to be deficient in vitamin B3 (a.k.a. niacin).

The other two-thirds of women, however, weren’t in the clear — because by the last three months of their pregnancies (the third trimester), the number of expectant moms who were deficient in B3 had doubled.

Now, without enough B3, the body can’t manufacture a vital protein called nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) — and without enough NAD, cells won’t function normally.

When that happens to an adult, there’s a long list of health problems it can trigger, including muscle loss, mitochondrial dysfunction, cell death, and extreme fatigue. And since NAD can enable cells to fix genes that might be defective, when a pregnant woman doesn’t have enough of it, birth defects can occur.

The Australian researchers were able to confirm this genetic connection by carefully studying the genes of 13 different families. All of them had suffered miscarriages and/or had had children who were born with serious birth defects, such as those of the heart, kidneys, or limbs.

As expected, some of those moms had a negative trifecta of low B3… insufficient NAD… and gene mutations.

Now, this isn’t the kind of thing you want to try to replicate in human trials, so the researchers bred mice to have those same genetic issues and impregnated them — and they found that those mice also had pups with birth defects, and they frequently miscarried.

The researchers were able to stop the miscarriages from happening… and witness the birth of healthy mice pups… just by adding vitamin B3 to their lab chow!

Since you can often find B3 in many prenatal vitamins (although in fairly small amounts) as well as many foods, there’s no reason for any expectant mom to come up short in this vital nutrient.

For example, high amounts of B3 are found in just four ounces of delicious and healthy foods like:

• tuna (over 25 mg)
• chicken breast (close to 16 mg)
• turkey (over 13 mg)
• salmon (over 9 mg)

But even if you’re not expecting to be expecting, niacin-rich foods can help naturally lower your blood pressure and cholesterol levels, as well as help relieve the pain of arthritis.

So, if there’s a mom-to-be — or hoping to be — in your life, please share this important information with her. Knowing about this truly historic finding may be one of the simplest ways to help keep our babies safe.

“Vitamin B3 may prevent some miscarriages, birth defects, study says” Susan Scutti, August 10, 2017, CNN, cnn.com