Maternal vitamin D showed no clear infant developmental benefit in this trial
Supplementation during pregnancy and breastfeeding did not clearly improve developmental scores among infants of Tanzanian mothers living with HIV.
Based on the published abstract. The full paper may contain additional methods, results and limitations.
The 30-second takeaway
Maternal vitamin D supplementation did not produce a statistically clear improvement in infants’ overall development compared with placebo. Language, movement, and cognitive scores also showed no clear differences. These findings concern the studied mothers living with HIV and their infants; they do not establish that the groups’ developmental outcomes were equivalent.
Assessments were completed for 1312 of 2167 eligible infants. This abstract-based explanation cannot evaluate missing outcomes, and the findings concern caregiver reports at a single age.
What researchers found
Overall development at age 1 year
Maternal vitamin D versus placebo; caregiver-reported developmental scores, expressed in standard-deviation units.
What was measured
Caregivers reported infant cognition, language, and movement using a developmental questionnaire. The analysis therefore concerns those assessed domains, rather than every possible outcome for the mothers or their infants.
Reading the score difference
A standard deviation describes how widely scores vary among infants. The estimated difference was 0.03 standard deviations higher with vitamin D; the confidence interval spans -0.09 to 0.15, allowing a small difference in either direction.
The original publication
Effect of vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy and lactation on the development of infants born to Tanzanian women living with HIV: a secondary analysis of a randomised controlled trial.
Shobanke T, Muhihi A, Perumal N et al.
BMJ Open · 2025
- PubMed ID
- 41120170
- Record checked
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