Preconception care
Preconception care means seeing a health care provider while planning a pregnancy, before it begins. A health care provider can help find and manage problems that could affect a later pregnancy, such as diabetes or high blood pressure, and can talk about folic acid, vaccines, smoking, alcohol and reaching a healthy weight. MedlinePlus says that by acting on health issues before pregnancy, you can prevent many future problems for yourself and your baby.
- Care topic
- In this atlas
Overview
Technical summary
Scope follows the MedlinePlus health topic page (last updated July 18, 2024) and the NIH page on pre-pregnancy and prenatal care, which shows a last reviewed date of 1/31/2017 and may be out of date. This page is the entry point to folic acid supplementation and to blood pressure review before a pregnancy. It makes no recommendation of its own; claims on the linked pages carry their own populations and sources.
Scope
Health care and checks before a pregnancy begins
- Life stages
- preconception
- Care setting
- Not reported
Claims and evidence
No claims are published for this care topic yet.
Clinical links
Each link reports what one cited claim says about one population. "Evaluated for" means studied, not shown to work. These links do not show that anything is effective or right for you.
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Claim, not a settled fact Recommended for this: Folic acid supplementation before and in early pregnancy
Applies to Maternal- Persons who are planning to or could become pregnant. The person takes the supplement; the benefit the USPSTF describes is in their offspring (neural tube defects).
- Not stated in the PubMed abstract
- United States (statement of the US Preventive Services Task Force); the abstract names no country.
- Before conception and during pregnancy (persons planning to or who could become pregnant)
- Gestational age Not reported
- Postnatal age Not reported
The US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommends that all persons planning to or who could become pregnant take a daily supplement containing 0.4 to 0.8 mg (400 to 800 micrograms) of folic acid. It grades this an A recommendation. It says it has high certainty that folic acid supplementation has a substantial net benefit in preventing neural tube defects in their offspring. This is a 2023 reaffirmation of an earlier recommendation, made after an evidence update.Limitations. Only the PubMed abstract was read. It gives the dose, the grade and the task force wording of certainty, but not the evidence behind them. USPSTF certainty levels are the task force’s own wording and not a GRADE rating, so certainty is not assessed here. The abstract does not describe higher-dose advice for people at higher risk of a neural tube defect.
Record details
- Record id
maternal:preconception-care- Content hash
4fef9654333df982aef2d9ea023d23d5ab1f7c3131fc5dc7e5283ce96431aca8