Seven-year-old children performed better on a challenging task requiring sustained attention if their mothers consumed twice the recommended amount of choline during their pregnancy, a new study has found.

The study, which compared these children with those whose mothers had consumed the recommended amount of choline, suggests that the recommended choline intake for expectant mothers does not fully meet the needs of the fetal brain.

«Our findings suggest population-wide benefits of adding choline to a standard prenatal vitamin regimen,» said Barbara Strupp, professor in the Division of Nutritional Sciences (DNS) and Department of Psychology, and co-senior author of the study, «Prenatal Choline Supplementation Improves Child Sustained Attention: A Seven-Year Follow-Up of a Randomized Controlled Feeding Trial,» published Dec. 28 in the Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

First author of the study is Charlotte Bahnfleth, Ph.D. ’19, a former graduate student in the Strupp Laboratory. Co-senior author is Richard Canfield, senior research associate in DNS. Marie Caudill, professor in DNS, was also a co-author.

Choline — found in egg yolks, lean red meat, fish, poultry, legumes, nuts and cruciferous vegetables — is absent from most prenatal vitamins, and more than 90% of expectant mothers consume less than the recommended amount.

Several decades of research using rodent models has shown that adding extra choline to the maternal diet produces long term cognitive benefits for the offspring. In addition to improving offspring attention and memory throughout life, maternal choline supplementation in rodents has proven to be neuroprotective for the offspring by mitigating the cognitive adversities caused by prenatal stress, fetal alcohol exposure, autism, epilepsy, Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease.

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Materials provided by Cornell University. Original written by Robin Roger. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.