Sorry moms, DHA won’t boost your kids’ IQ

Researchers determine supplements used during pregnancy had little effect

Researchers have some bad news for moms who used DHA supplements while they were pregnant in hopes of boosting their baby’s brains: It didn’t work. At age 7, kids whose mothers took DHA scored no higher on an IQ test than kids whose moms swallowed capsules that were DHA-free.

The results are the latest findings from a study assessing the benefits — if any — of giving DHA to babies in utero. The findings were recently published in Journal of the American Medical Association. DHA, short for docosahexaenoic acid, is an omega-3 fatty acid that plays a key role in brain health. It’s essential throughout our lives, and especially during infancy when the brain, eyes and nervous system are developing.

DHA is a natural component of breast milk, and manufacturers often add it to infant formula. So it was probably just a matter of time before it took off as a component of prenatal vitamins.

To find out if it works, researchers in Australia recruited 2,399 pregnant women to participate in a randomized clinical trial. Some of the women were given capsules that contained 800 milligrams of DHA per day. Others got a placebo that had vegetable oil instead.

That was back in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Now the oldest children have reached age 7, making them eligible to take an IQ test.

The test — the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, Second Edition — was administered to 259 children whose mothers took DHA during pregnancy and 284 children whose moms received the placebo. An “average” score on the test is 100; the minimum score to qualify as “gifted” is typically 130.

As a whole, neither group came close to that mark. The average score for the kids in the DHA group was 98.31, compared with an average score of 97.32 for kids in the placebo group, according to the JAMA report. That difference wasn’t large enough to be considered statistically significant.

However, questionnaires filled out by parents revealed that the DHA kids had more behavior problems than their counterparts. The children in the DHA group also had higher scores for executive dysfunction, according to the study.

It wasn’t the first time the researchers saw the DHA children come up short. The researchers assessed the children’s “cognitive, language and motor development” when they were 18 months old and found no differences between the groups. When the kids were 4 years old, the researchers saw no sign that the DHA group had any advantage in general intelligence, executive functioning or language compared with the kids in the placebo group.