Dr. Jean-Jacques Dugoua advises women in their first trimester to take probiotics. Probiotics can prevent infection, and help bring the pregnancy to full-term. He also recommends folic acid, for prevention of birth defects.
Dr. Dugoua is a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine, the director of the Liberty Clinc and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto. He is researching the safety of natural products during pregnancy and lactation at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto.
(Transcribed from video interview)
Dr. Dugoua:
The most important thing of the first trimester is keeping the baby. So what we put or what I put my patients on from the beginning, that’s based on evidence-based researches is probiotics. What we found is that when you give women probiotics during pregnancy, they are more likely to carry the baby to term. Also the baby is less likely to be a pre-term, and it also helps decrease a lot of side effects of pregnancy, bacterial infections and so on.
Folic acid - very important. What we know now from modeling is that we expect that if we would increase the daily folic acid level to 5 milligrams, we would probably diminish the risk of neural tube defects by less than above five percent. So right now, standard of care is about 400 micrograms so 0.4 milligrams, whereas we’re recommending that gets moved to 5000 micrograms, so 5 milligrams.
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Video:
https://www.empowher.com/pregnancy/content/how-should-woman-her-first-trimester-advocate-herself-and-her-baby-dr-dugoua-video