A pre-pregnancy year of folic acid sharply lowers risk of very premature birth
Los Angeles Times, May 12, 2009
UTMB’s Radek Bukowski is quoted about a study he and his colleagues conducted that found that taking folic acid supplements for a year before conception reduces the risk of very premature birth by at least 50 percent. The researchers, according to the article, were able to screen a much larger number of women by piggybacking their research onto a National Institutes of Health study that was testing methods of screening for Down syndrome. “It was such a large data set, with so much information, that we were able to answer this question as well,” Bukowski said. Versions of the article have been broadly published, including the Chicago Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman. The study was published on the online journal PLOS Medicine.