Answer from: Stephen Davies, BSc MBBS DCH DRCOG
I would advise all ladies of reproductive age alongside taking their preconception folic acid, to takes low-dose vitamin D (approximately a thousand units per day) which you can buy over the counter in the whole of Europe and that might be in the context of a broader nutritional supplement but as long as those two key features are within it: the folic acid and vitamin D. They are I think just their standard recommendations that all ladies should be thinking about. There may be more specific advice that might be relevant in people who are perhaps vegans or whatever but that’s something they perhaps should talk to their clinician about just to make sure there might not be other elements that might need to be supplemented.
Answer from: Ioannis John Toliopoulos, PhD
Stable parameters that we have to check for the women is vitamin D3 – this has to be high because we have seen many cases, especially in Caucasian women, they do not absorb the vitamin D from the sun so we need to give them supplement of vitamin D3 to be above at least 30 or 35. The last parameter that we check to be normal that we check every month or every two months in women who proceeds in IVF trial or natural conception is also vitamin B12.
Many women that are disappointed because the pregnancy doesn’t come and when we see that levels of vitamin B12 is lower then we give the supplements to increase and to be at least in the middle range of the references and then we proceed to next level of immunological test ETA embryo-toxicity assay and blocking factors that where we close our testing with the other two specific tests.
