A simple multivitamin pill could twice the chances of a woman of having a baby and the pill costing only for 30p a day. Researchers found that sixty percent of women taking the supplement pills while undergoing IVF got pregnant in comparison to just a quarter those did not take that supplements.
The fertility of a woman is known to be affected by several aspects including age, weight, alcohol consumption, and habit of smoking. High levels of stress and even excessive drinking of coffee have also been found to diminish the chances of getting pregnant.
The pills contain nutrients, such as vitamins A, C and E, zinc and selenium which believe to improve fertility and are often missing from women’s diet. A team from at University College London carried out a study involving sixty women aged eighteen to forty. The study participants, had all tried ineffectively to fall pregnant using IVF for no less than a year.
Half of the study participants were given a multi-nutrient pill containing folic acid, which is known to prevent birth defects and has also been shown to help boost fertility, to take daily and other half were given only folic acid pill to take every day. They found that sixty percent of women those taking multi-nutrients fell pregnant.
In addition to that those women did not miscarry in the first trimester, when miscarriage happened more frequently. In comparison twenty-five percent of women those taking folic acid were still pregnant after three months of pregnancy. It was also found that women taking micronutrients required far less attempts to get pregnant in IVF treatment.
According lead author Dr Rina Agrawal, the insinuations of this research are far reaching as they suggest that prenatal micronutrient supplementation in women undergoing ovulation induction improve pregnancy rates. There is a large body of evidence establishing the relationship between placental development, foetal growth, pregnancy outcomes and adequate nutrition, particularly vitamin intake.
There are relatively few studies which have examined this systematically and few which have shown direct benefits of taking supplements to enhance fertility. This study is interesting but it should acknowledged that this is a relatively small number of patients and the study would need to be repeated in a larger before reaching any conclusion, sated Dr Allan Pacey, fertility expert from the University of Sheffield.
The micronutrients pill, particularly Vitabiotics Pregnacare-Conception, contains folic acid, vitamin B, vitamin E, vitamin A, vitamin C, zinc, selenium and some antioxidants.