Folic acid intake in prevention of congenital heart defects: A mini evidence review.

Abstract

Congenital heart defects (CHDs) have been known as the most frequent kind of congenital disorders among all human congenital abnormalities all over the world. There has been a potential connection between the use of folic acid by mothers and an amelioration in the rate of offsprings being born with CHDs in future. In this article, we aimed to assess the strength of evidence related to folic acid intake in prevention of CHDs. PubMed, Web of science, Scopus, ScienceDirect, and the Cochrane Library were searched up to October 2019 for publications involving the association between using folic acid and rate of CHDs. The search strategy yielded 1223 potentially relevant articles. Reading the titles and abstracts was fulfilled after finishing the search of databases to identify appropriate articles for review of full texts of the publications. A total of 20 articles were finalized for full text analysis. No more publications were added to current study after the reference review of the included studies. Based on the conducted studies, the effectiveness of folic acid alone on CHDs is still not fully clear and more comprehensive studies, well-designed trials with respect to well-defined CHDs, appropriate doses of folic acid, early onset of its prescription in a homogeneous population of nulliparous women without any history of abortions or stillbirths are needed to develop medical primary preventive measures for CHDs in future.