Offie Soldin: Striving to Prevent a Million Cases of Infant
Mental Retardation by Giving Women a Good Prenatal Vitamin Offie
Soldin, PhD, thinks it’s heartbreaking that most pregnant women
in the U.S. don’t know that prenatal vitamins with sufficient
iodine could prevent a drop of IQ in their babies, and
potentially foil neurobehavioral deficits. And it is unfortunate
that many doctors don’t recognize the problem either, says
Soldin, an epidemiologist at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer
Center. If they did, more pregnant women would be encouraged to
take daily prenatal vitamins with folic acid and iodine, and be
tested for hypothyroidism, an insufficient production of thyroid
hormone. Soldin’s research interests are in maternal exposure to
toxins that can affect the fetus. For example, she recently
demonstrated an association between higher levels of common
household pesticides in the urine of children with acute
lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a cancer that usually develops in
children between the age of 3 an