This Article  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Leslie E. Daly, PhD
University College Dublin

Peadar N. Kirke, FFPHMI
Health Research Board

Anne Molloy, PhD; Donald G. Weir, MD, FRCP; John M. Scott, DSc
Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

JAMA. 1996;275(21):1635-1636.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—The letter by Dr Czeizel about the protective effect of a multivitamin preparation containing folic acid on NTDs and other congenital malformations raises an important public health issue.

It is now accepted that periconceptional folic acid prevents both the recurrence and occurrence of NTDs. However, we wish to emphasize that the evidence to date regarding the effects of folic acid in preventing other birth defects, cardiovascular disease, or some cancers is much more tenuous. Most of the studies examining these questions were observational rather than randomized, and the protective effects, in the main, were related to multivitamins that happened to include folic acid. In particular, the protective effects on birth defects noted in the letter by Czeizel, though based on a randomized trial, were for a preparation that contained folic acid as just 1 of many ingredients. The efficacy of folic acid per se in conditions other than . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?