A woman's race may determine whether vitamin D helps them to conceive through IVF.
The sunshine vitamin is famed for its benefit to bones and the immune system, but it also plays a role in conception. Now, evidence suggests that the vitamin's benefits may only apply to certain racial groups while white women can boost their IVF success rates with vitamin D, the opposite appears to be true for Asian women.
For couples struggling to conceive, in vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a popular option. The technique involves extracting eggs from a woman and fertilising them with sperm outside of the body. The resulting embryo is then transferred into the uterus. As many
women know, IVF isn't a guaranteed ticket to pregnancy less than a third of treated women under 35 will go on to have a baby, and the odds decrease with age.
In 2010, Sebiha ึzkan at Kocaeli University in Turkey and her colleagues found that women with the recommended levels of Vitamin D (30 ng/mil) appeared to boost their chances of IVF success. Women with the highest levels of vitamin D were four times more likely to get pregnant than those with the lowest levels (Fertility and Sterility, DOI: 10.1016/j.fertnstert.2009.05.019).
Both IVF success rates and vitamin D levels are known to vary by race. To find out whether vitamin D carries the same benefits in women of different races, Briana Rudick at Columbia University Medical Center in New York and her colleagues compared vitamin D levels and IVF success rates in white Hispanic, white non-Hispanic, and Asian women from south-east Asia and the Indian subcontinent. All 188 women were having IVF for the first time.