More on Vitamins and Pregnancy

One of the hardest parts about writing health stories is figuring out what to leave out. Last Friday I wrote a post that focused on prenatal vitamins and the risk of pediatric cancer. Although the vitamins reduced the risk of some cancers by 50 percent, I calculated that that was not a huge change because the absolute risk of getting cancer in childhood is so low."But isn't taking vitamins during

Vitamins Reduce Cancer Risk--Relatively Speaking

A new study shows that women who take multivitamins and folic acid during pregnancy reduce the chance that their baby will develop some childhood cancers by almost 50%. Your first question on reading this should be "50% of what?"In other words, you want to know what the absolute risk of developing pediatric cancer is. Then you can figure out whether a 50% reduction (the so-called relative risk)