translated from Spanish: Scientists say consuming fish in pregnancy would help improve care in children

World.- A scientific team from the Barcelona Institute of Global Health (ISGlobal) has studied the relationship between the consumption of different types of fish during pregnancy and the attention span of children at the age of eight.
The results, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, show that a diet rich in fish during the earliest stages of pregnancy is related to beneficial effects for that ability.
The research has been carried out on 1,641 couples of mothers and children belonging to the INMA (Children and Environment) Project, a Spanish research network aimed at studying the role of pollutants during pregnancy and their effects on childhood. During the nine months, the mothers completed numerous questionnaires covering various frequencies of consumption for more than one hundred foods, including fish.
According to the study’s findings, which follows the line of previously published research on 5-year-olds, “fish consumption during the first trimester of pregnancy shows an effect on children’s attention span greater than with intake during late pregnancy or intake by children at age five, when some of the neurodevelopment processes have already ended,” says Jordi Júlvez, first author of the paper and researcher of the Children and A half ISGlobal environment.
The formation of the brain occurs mainly during pregnancy, through complex biological processes such as the generation of neurons, the creation of synapses and neuronal myelination. Essential nutrients, such as polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), are critical to these processes. “Docosahexaenoic (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic (EPA) acids are the main omega-3 PUFAs involved in neurological development and the main source of both is fish,” adds Úlvez.
These essential nutrients are involved in defining the structure and function of the fetus’ brain, thus having a great impact on subsequent neuropsychological development. Attention is a complex behavior that every infant needs to learn, since it precedes the performance of other primordial functions, such as memory. “We focus on the care function because attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (ADHD) are common pathologies during the school age,” says Jordi Sunyer, Director of THE Children and Environment Program at ISGlobal.
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Source: Sinc

Original source in Spanish