Folic Acid Important for Pregnant Women

January is National Birth Defects Prevention and Awareness Month, and the first week in January is National Folic Acid Awareness Week. The Lexington-Fayette County Health Department is highlighting the importance of this worthy cause by encouraging all women of childbearing age to consume a multivitamin that contains 400 mcg of folic acid each and every day. Doing so can lower the risk of serious birth defects of the brain or spine by 70 percent. Folic acid should be taken daily for three months prior to conception, but with half of all pregnancies being unplanned, ideally, all childbearing age women should take folic acid daily, whether planning a pregnancy or not.

The Kentucky Folic Acid Partnership has been working to improve perinatal health since 1998. Although nearly every state in the United States has implemented a Folic Acid Coalition at that time, after 10 years Kentucky is one of the few states that has managed to keep its partnership intact and healthy. During this time, the mission of the KFAP has expanded to include additional perinatal health issues, such as prematurity prevention. Folic Acid use remains a top priority of the partnership because not only does it prevent neural tube defects, it is also linked to decreasing the risk to mothers of miscarriage, stillbirth, and preterm births. Fitting these two priorities together as one focal point has helped us reach larger populations of women with the evidence-based facts that improve outcomes for the mothers and babies in Kentucky .

For more information on the Kentucky Folic Acid Partnership, visit www.kfap.org.