Vitamin A and iron supplementation of Indonesian pregnant women benefits vitamin A status of their infants

Many Indonesian infants have an inadequate nutritional status, which may be due in part to inadequate maternal nutrition during pregnancy. This study was designed to investigate whether infant nutritional status could be improved by maternal vitamin A and Fe supplementation during gestation. Mothers of these infants from five villages had been randomly assigned on an individual basis, supervised and double-blind, to receive supplementation once weekly from approximately 18 weeks of pregnancy until delivery. Supplementation comprised 120 mg Fe and 500 μg folic acid with or without 4800 retinol equivalent vitamin A. Mothers of infants from four other villages who participated in the national Fe and folic acid supplementation programme were also recruited; intake of tablets was not supervised. Anthropometric and biochemical parameters of infants and their mothers were assessed approximately 4 months after delivery. Infants of mothers supplemented with vitamin A plus Fe had higher serum retinol concentrations than infants of mothers supplemented with Fe alone. However, the proportion of infants with serum retinol concentrations 70 n all groups. Maternal and infant serum retinol concentrations were correlated. Fe status, weight and length of infants were similar in all groups. Fe status of girls was better than that of boys, but boys were heavier and longer. We conclude that supplementation with vitamin A in conjunction with Fe supplementation of women during pregnancy benefits vitamin A status of their infants. However, considering the large proportion of infants with marginal serum retinol concentrations, it may still be necessary to increase their vitamin A intake

Therapeutic options for patients with chronic refractory angina pectoris

In Raman thermometry, several assumptions are made to model the heat conduction and to extract the thermal conductivity of the samples from the measured data. In this work, the heat conduction in bulk and mesa-like samples was investigated by numerical simulation and measured by the temperature-induced Raman shift method, to study the range of applicability of these assumptions. The effects of light penetration depth and finite sample size on the accuracy of the thermal conductivity determination were investigated by comparing the results of the finite element method with the usual analytical approximation for bulk samples. We found that the assumptions used in the analytical model can be applied to extract the thermal conductivity in solids if the following conditions are fulfilled: the ratio of light penetration depth to laser spot radius is smaller than 0.5, the ratio of spot radius to sample thickness is smaller than 0.1, and the ratio of spot radius to sample half width is smaller than 0.01.JJF and CMST acknowledge the Swedish Research Council VR (349-2007-8664 and 2014-5100) and the Linnaeus Center in Advanced Optics and Photonics for financial support. CMST and ECA acknowledge support from the Spanish MINECO and the Catalan AGAUR (FIS2015-70862-P and CSD2010-00044). JJF is especially grateful to Dr. M. Sledzinska and Dr. B Graczykowski for discussions and assistance with the Raman measurements and simulations. JJF thanks Profs. S. Anand and S. Lourdudoss, and Mr. A. Abedin, for providing the bulk and microcrystal samples. ICN2 acknowledges support from the Severo Ochoa Program (MINECO, Grant SEV-2013-0295) and funding from the CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya.Peer reviewe