Pregnancy Diet: Eating Healthy Can Help Reduce Baby's Risk of Heart Problems

A research published in the Archives of Disease in Childhood (Fetal & Neonatal Edition) has found that moms, who have a relatively healthy diet a year prior to pregnancy, can give birth to babies with lower risks of heart disease.

"The more you went up in diet quality, the less the risk for severe congenital heart anomalies," lead author Dr. Lorenzo Botto, a professor of pediatrics and a medical geneticist at the University of Utah School of Medicine, told HealthDay.

In a press release, the researchers said that congenital heart problems are common, affecting around one percent of newborns in the U.S. Around one in four children will die in infancy as a result.

"They are common, they are critical and we really don't know how to prevent them," Botto said, per HealthDay.

According to the press release, the researchers evaluated data from about 19,000 mothers, almost 10,000 of which gave birth to babies with heart defects and about 9,500 with healthy babies. These mothers gave birth between October 1997 and December 2009 and are part of the National Birth Defects Prevention Study.

The quality of their diet a year prior to pregnancy was validated using two scoring systems: the Mediterranean Diet Score and the Diet Quality Index for Pregnancy (DQI-P).

It was found that moms who were in the top 25 percent of diet quality, as assessed by the DQI-P, had a significantly lower risk of having a baby with heart defects when compared to moms who were in the bottom 25 percent.

It was also found that better diet was associated with 23 percent lower risk of atrial septal defects and 37 percent lower risk of tetralogy of Fallot.

Atrial septal defects mean having a hole in the dividing wall of the heart called the septum. This wall divides the heart's upper chambers. Tetralogy of Fallot, according to the National Institutes of Health, is a dangerous, complex heart defect that causes poor oxygen levels in the blood that flows through the body.

Botto said, per HealthDay, that "having a healthy woman tends to lead to a healthy baby." 

The findings support the need for women to have a healthy diet before they get pregnant. The researchers add that if a woman waits for pregnancy before she starts to eat healthy, it could be too late.

"There's been a very reasonable focus on prenatal care, but to maximize primary prevention for heart defects and other structural malformations, we've got to go even a step further and really focus on preconception care," Botto adds via MedPage Today.