Our baby boy is now about 16 months old and everything seems to be going well.  Of course - its impossible to determine what the relative impact of the possible prenatal supplements have had on our son (my wife took about 2 grams/day of DHA omega 3's, in addition to the 3.5 grams of Choline supplements -- plus many others - like extra Iron, Iodine, vitamin C, Vitamin D, etc. - per day during the second half of her pregnancy)  - but the impact so far seems to have been quite significantly positive.

Our son started walking at the same time - at about 8 months - but he was only taking 3 to 5 steps before he'd fall down and we have a hardwood floor in our house so we didn't encourage these  explorations alone. 

By 9.5 months he was walking across the room alone on a regular basis - and we let him explore alone even more when we were visiting family and friends during summer vacation and with carpeted floor everywhere there was less concern about him face-planting on the wood floor.  After the carpeted floor experience, he never looked back. 

He started saying his first words at around 11 months - and now at 16 months has a vocabulary of about 80 or 90 words and its increasing very quickly.  It really does seem to me that his memory is significantly better than expected.  Most kids his age are talking with only 5 to 10 words says our pediatrician.

So far - the choline supplement effort during pregnancy seems to be paying off.

Tune in next month - and I'll try to post more frequent updates. 

Choline is being increasingly identified as a key nutrian for a child's healthy brain development during pregnancy. 

A newborn's risk for brain and spinal-cord defects rises if the mother has low blood levels of the nutrient choline during pregnancy, researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered.

The scientists used a collection of 180,000 blood samples from pregnant California women to look for risk factors for two neural tube birth defects: anencephaly, a lethal condition in which the brain and skull do not develop, and spina bifida, a spinal-cord malformation that causes paralysis and lifelong disability. Neural tube defects have become less common since the 1996 decision to fortify the U.S. food supply with folic acid, a B-vitamin shown to prevent the defects, but they have not disappeared.

"Families whose infants die or suffer permanent disability from NTDs still feel the burden of these defects," said Gary Shaw, DrPH, professor of neonatology and primary author of the new research, which will appear Aug. 14 in Epidemiology.

About 500 pregnancies per year are affected by neural tube defects in California alone, noted Shaw. "We're keen on understanding what risk factors explain the continued disease."

Shaw's study targeted a group of nutrients suspected to promote brain and spinal-cord development. In early pregnancy, a sealed tube forms along the embryo's back that later grows into the brain and spinal cord. Neural tube defects occur if the tube does not seal correctly. Based on prior research on folic acid, scientists believe that development of the neural tube may depend on a specific biochemical pathway that requires several vitamins and essential nutrients to operate properly. Shaw's team measured blood levels of 13 of these nutrients in two groups of women who participated in California's prenatal birth-defect screening program.

From 180,000 pregnant women screened between 2003 and 2005, the researchers identified 80 whose pregnancies were affected by neural tube defects. Their blood samples were compared to 409 samples randomly selected from among the women whose infants had no structural birth defects.

Choline, an essential nutrient found in egg yolks, soy, wheat germ and meats, was the only nutrient measured whose blood levels were linked to risk of neural tube defects.

"As choline levels went up, risk went down," Shaw said. Risk for neural tube defects was 2.4 times higher in women with the lowest blood choline levels compared to women with average blood choline levels. The highest blood choline levels were associated with the lowest risk. A previous study by Shaw's group showed that consumption of choline-rich foods was associated with lower risk for neural tube defects, but this is the first study to evaluate blood levels of choline and NTD risk.

Shaw's work provides a promising target for future clinical trials on neural tube defect prevention, said Louanne Hudgins, MD, division chief of medical genetics at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, who did not participate in the study. Hudgins, who is also a professor of pediatric genetics at the medical school, regularly counsels families facing prenatal diagnoses of neural tube defects. "You can't change an individual's genetic predisposition to these defects. But nutrition components to NTD risk are ripe for therapy," she said.

Shaw cautioned that the blood samples tested were obtained between the 15th and 18th week of pregnancy, well after formation of the neural tube, which seals around the sixth week of pregnancy. Future research will be needed to examine blood choline levels in early pregnancy, he said. Researchers also need to test whether choline supplements given in early pregnancy reduce the rates of neural tube defects. Right now, prenatal multivitamins contain little or no choline.

For women who want to become pregnant, "the best source for choline is still eating a variety of foods," Shaw concluded. Women of reproductive age should also follow U.S. Public Health Service recommendations to take a multivitamin containing other nutrients previously shown to promote healthy pregnancies, he said.

The study was funded by grants from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, theNational Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the Foundation to Promote Research into Functional Vitamin B12 Deficiency.

Doctors at the University Of Colorado Are Testing Choline (taken during pregnancy by the mother) to Prevent Mental Illness in the children.

A popular word at the University of Colorado Denver's Department of Psychiatry is "choline," a nutrient found in many of our foods, but not prenatal supplements.

Researchers believe choline may be a missing link when it comes to preventing mental illness in the womb, helping developing brain cells become stable and properly communicate with one another.

"We've looked at it specifically for its ability to help a brain develop resistance to mental illness," said Dr. Randy Ross, the study's lead investigator.

In this new study Moms-to-be take three capsules of choline two times a day during pregnancy. After birth, children are observed for 18 months to document motor skill, problem solving and language development.

This same group of researchers has already published research on animals that demonstrated that Choline during pregnancy seemed to prevent many of the brain changes that are common in young rodents that are predisposed to "mental illness" (see links below for this research). 

Source: University of Denver Choline during Pregnancy Study, ClinicalTrials.gov

Animal Studies that have shown how choline during pregnancy may prevent mental illness:

Permanent improvement in deficient sensory inhibition in DBA/2 mice with increased perinatal choline.

Perinatal choline deficiency produces abnormal sensory inhibition in Sprague-Dawley rats.

Research into choline and epigenetics is expanding rapidly.  Today there was an announcement by the Welcome Trust in the UK of a new study on how dietary factors (including choline) during pregnancy, impact the long term health of the baby.  I'm sure we'll see a lot more of these over the coming decade. 

Here is the news release:

Experiment of nature' examines how mother's diet may impact on child's health

Could our mother's diet at the time we are conceived set the course for our future health? This intriguing question is at the heart of a new study based on an "experiment of nature" being conducted by Wellcome Trust-funded researchers.

We inherit our DNA the genetic blueprint that determines our make-up from our parents: 50% of our DNA from our mothers and 50% from our fathers. Apart from the occasional mutation, deletion or duplication of information, this DNA remains unchanged between generations.

The environment, for example our diet, whether we smoke, and the toxins that we encounter in our daily life, can cause changes in how our genes are expressed in other words, how they function and these changes can be inherited, even when the DNA sequence itself does not change. These so-called "epigenetic" effects can occur through a process known as DNA methylation, where methyl caps bind to our DNA and act like dimmer switches on our genes.

Now, Dr Branwen Hennig and colleagues from the Medical Research Council (MRC) International Nutrition Group based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have been awarded 360,000 from the Wellcome Trust to look at whether a mother's diet during pregnancy can influence these epigenetic effects.

The study will be conducted at the MRC Laboratories in Keneba, The Gambia, where the seasonal variability of food provides the ideal environment to conduct an "experiment of nature".

"During the 'hungry season' people eat mainly what they have in store, such as cereals and dried food," explains Ms Paula Dominguez-Salas, who will conduct the fieldwork in The Gambia. "They are working in the fields and have a very high energy expenditure, but their intake is very low. The 'harvest season' is the other way round and food, including fresh foods, is in relatively plentiful supply."

The researchers will measure the diets of women in early pregnancy for nutrients which affect methylation, such as folate and choline, and some B vitamins which are essential co-factors in methylation. They will compare these to levels of the nutrients in the women's blood and once the children have been born, the researchers will measure methylation patterns of the babies' DNA. This will help the researchers assess whether there is a correlation between the mother's diet and her nutritional status, and whether there are differences in methylation patterns in babies conceived during the harvest or hungry seasons.

If a mother's diet does affect her offspring's methylation patterns, this could prove very important as epigenetic changes mediated by DNA methylation are likely to have long term effects on the health and physical characteristics of offspring. Animal studies have shown that supplementing the diet of pregnant mice can lead to very marked differences in their offspring with mice fed a folate-depleted diet producing litter with different coat colour or "kinked" tails compared to those fed a diet rich in folate.

"Alterations in DNA methylation are thought to increase the risk of a child developing chronic conditions later in life, such as cardiovascular disease, cancers and type II diabetes," says Dr Hennig. "We think these epigenetic changes are established very early on in the womb."

This will be the first time that the effects of a mother's diet on epigenetic alterations of her children will be studied so extensively. A study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at the effect of wartime blockades in the Netherlands on the nutritional intake of mothers and whether this affected their children's expression of the IGF2 gene, which is involved in growth, as adults. It found that the IGF2 gene had 5 per cent fewer methyl caps in "famine babies" than in their siblings born outside this period. However, the study by Dr Hennig and colleagues will enable the researchers to accurately measure maternal nutritional intake and compare this to methylation patterns in their children.

The study has been welcomed by Dr Alan Schafer, Head of Molecular and Physiological Sciences at the Wellcome Trust.

"This is a very interesting and exciting area of research," says Dr Schafer. "Finding a link between these women's diet and epigenetic changes could ultimately have important implications for our understanding of long term health effects and advice on healthy eating."

Source; Welcome Trust

At a talk at the Oregon Health Sciences University in May, 2007 - one of the top researchers who is focused on Choline (Dr. Steven Zeisel, University of North Carolina) spoke. 

"Dr. Zeisel pointed out that choline is very important for the fetal brain, and can be obtained as a supplement as phosphatidyl choline [obtained via Lecithin].  2-4 eggs per day provide enough choline during pregnancy.  The current daily value is 450 mg, but it would be useful to set the level at 850 mg.   It is like fish oil, having lifelong effect on an infant's early brain development. "

There is an ongoing human study on choline in babies right now - where they are using 900mg doses (in the pregnant mothers).  The US Food and Nutrition Board, Institute of Medicine in 1998 came out with a report on choline that suggested the maximum tolerable limit for adults (including pregnant women) is 3.75 grams/day (which is 50% of the level (7 grams/ day) at which researchers had seen any possible negative symptoms in studies.

People I have shared this information with have supplemented their diet (during pregnancy) with between 500mg and 4 grams per day, without any obvious negative symptoms - but the children are still young.  One of the biggest risk factors in this is the quality of the supplements that people take and the risk of possible contamination of the supplements.  Because of this - the researchers I've talked to tend to recommend eggs as the best source of choline (though one researcher recommended high quality Lecithin as a good source).  

Source: (Linus Pauling Institute meeting, May 2007) Medical Doctor's Research

You can read more about Choline here at the Linus Pauling Institute web site - Choline details