Maternal dietary intake of fish and PUFAs and child neurodevelopment at 6 months and 1 year of age: a nationwide birth cohort—the Japan Environment and Children’s Study (JECS)

Abstract

Background Although emerging evidence indicates a relation between maternal intake of fish and improved child neurodevelopment, the results are inconsistent. Objectives This study investigated whether dietary consumption of fish during pregnancy is associated with offspring neurodevelopment at age 6 mo and 1 y. As exploratory research, we also examined the association between consumption of PUFAs and neurodevelopment at the same time points. Methods After exclusion and multiple imputation from a dataset comprising 104,065 records from the Japan Environment and Children's Study, we evaluated 81,697 and 77,751 mother-child pairs at age 6 mo and 1 y, respectively. Results Maternal fish intake during pregnancy was independently associated with reduced risk of delay in problem-solving at age 6 mo (lowest compared with highest quintile OR = 0.88; 95% CI: 0.79, 0.99; P-trend = 0.01) and in fine motor skills (highest quintile OR = 0.90; 95% CI: 0.81, 0.99; P-trend = 0.02) and problem-solving (fourth quintile OR = 0.89; 95% CI: 0.81, 0.98; and highest quintile OR = 0.90; 95% CI: 0.81, 0.99; P-trend = 0.005) at age 1 y. Dietary intake of total n–3 PUFAs was associated with reduced risk of delay in fine motor skills at 6 mo, and in fine motor skills and problem-solving at 1 y. Dietary intake of total n–6 PUFAs was associated with reduced risk of delay in communication and fine motor skills at 6 mo, and in gross motor skills, fine motor skills, and problem-solving at 1 y. In contrast, the dietary n–6/n–3 ratio was positively associated with increased risk of delay in problem-solving at 1 y. Conclusions The results of this study suggest there might be beneficial effects of fish intake during pregnancy on some domains of child psychomotor development and this effect might be partially explained by PUFA intake from fish. Trial registration: UMIN000030786.

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Fruit and vegetable consumption before and during pregnancy and developmental delays in offspring aged 2 years in Japan

“…In addition to fruit, vegetables and the vitamins contained in them, several previous studies reported that fish and polyunsaturated fatty acids such as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) were beneficial for neurodevelopment in offspring (5,6) . Comparing fish and unsaturated fatty acid consumption by quartiles of fruit and vegetable consumption, the higher the quartile of vegetable consumption, the higher the fish and unsaturated fatty acid consumption (Tables S2-S5).…”

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