Ingesta de hierro y folatos durante el embarazo y su relación con indicadores bioquímicos maternos

introduction: anemia during pregnancy is a public health problem in latin america, including colombia. objective: to evaluate the biochemical indicators of iron and folate nutritional state in a group of pregnant women belonging to a nutritional government program in antioquia (colombia). materials and methods: quasi-experimental study of 26 poor pregnant women, who were beneficiaries of a program that included nutritional education, food complement fortified with micronutrients and supplements of iron, folic acid and vitamin c. dietetic ingestion was evaluated by 24 hours reminders; the following parameters were measured: seric ferritin, hemoglobin, mean corpuscular volume, c reactive protein, and seric folate. a stool specimen was examined for parasites. pearson test was applied to correlate folate ingestion with seric folate concentration; spearman test was used to correlate iron ingestion and seric ferritin; anova of repeated measurements was employed for comparison between pregnancy trimesters; simple and multiple regression analyses were used to establish dependency of ferritin, hemoglobin and serum folate on the variables of interest. p < 0.05 was considered as significant. results: anemia was prevented in 84.6%. the variable that better explained hemoglobin change during the third trimester was its value in the second trimester. microcytosis diminished (p = 0.02) but women with the lesser iron ingestion had the highest prevalence during the third trimester (p = 0.009). iron deficiency increased during pregnancy (p < 0.001) and a positive correlation was found between iron ingestion and ferritin concentration during the third trimester (r = 0.64; p < 0.001). seric folate concentration increased during the second and third trimesters (p = 0.018), and a trend was observed toward positive correlation with folate ingestion, which was significant in the third trimester (r = 0.40, p = 0.044). conclusion: nutritional supplements showed a positive effect on biochemic