Vitamin A Deficiency

The investigators hypothesize that single oral high dose supplementation with vitamin A will reduce the incidence of moderate-severe chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) compared with placebo.

Preterm infants are at increased risk of vitamin A deficiency because they are born with low vitamin A stores and depend largely on breast milk to meet their nutritional needs. This study will evaluate whether daily maternal vitamin A supplementation increases vitamin A concentrations in the breast milk of mothers who deliver infants before 29 weeks of gestation. Participants will receive a commercially available oral multivitamin supplement containing 1,300 mcg retinol activity equivalents (RAE) of vitamin A daily for four months after delivery. Breast milk samples will be collected at 2 weeks, 2 months, and 4 months postpartum to measure vitamin A concentrations. The study will assess whether maternal supplementation is a feasible approach for increasing breast milk vitamin A concentrations in mothers of preterm infants.

This study aims to investigate whether vitamin A supplementation can influence spinal curve magnitude in idiopathic scoliosis children and potentially prevent its de novo development.

Two cross-sectional, repeated-pass, community-based studies will be carried out during the school year. The first study will be conducted from November to December. This period corresponds to the end of the rainy season and the end of the mango season, which is one of the main sources of vitamin A in the Orodara region. The second survey will be carried out 5 to 6 months (April-May of the following year) after data collection for the first study, corresponding to the mango season. The same schoolchildren recruited during the first phase of data collection (5 to 6 months earlier) will be the participants in the second study. The interest of this study is to use nuclear techniques to implement a strategy for the precise and accurate determination of Vitamin A status in order to reinforce existing Vitamin A interventions and policies.