Assessment of Serum Folate and Vitamin B12 Status in Neonates of Preeclamptic and Eclamptic Mothers in Northwestern Nigeria

Background: The physiological journey of pregnancy inextricably links maternal well-being to infant health outcomes. Complications occurring within the placenta and maternal systems, specifically eclampsia and preeclampsia, severely disrupt the developing fetus's homeostatic balance. Consequently, this investigation was designed to evaluate the serum concentrations of vitamin B12 and folate in newborns delivered by women enduring these hypertensive conditions. Materials and Methods: A hospital-based, comparative cross-sectional research framework was implemented, focusing on mother-infant dyads at the Specialist Hospital and Usmanu Danfodiyo University Teaching Hospital located in Sokoto. The study successfully enrolled 56 pairs distributed across normotensive, eclamptic, and preeclamptic clinical categories. Structured questionnaires were utilized to systematically gather clinical demographics. Three milliliters of venous blood from the mothers and an equal volume of umbilical cord blood from their newborns were drawn into unmedicated collection tubes. To quantify vitamin B12 and folate concentrations, researchers employed Calbiotech ELISA kits, analyzing the samples spectrophotometrically at a wavelength of 450 nm. All statistical evaluations were processed via SPSS version 27.0. After verifying data normality with the Shapiro-Wilk test, means and standard deviations were scrutinized using ANOVA and independent t-tests, adopting a statistical significance threshold of p ≤ 0.05. Results: Infants born to mothers battling eclampsia and preeclampsia demonstrated substantially elevated average serum vitamin B12 concentrations (357.10 ± 163.6 pg/mL and 371.48 ± 163.8 pg/mL, respectively) when contrasted with the healthy control cohort (254.01 ± 85.8 pg/mL), yielding a highly significant p-value of <0.001. Conversely, analysis of umbilical cord serum folate revealed no statistically significant variance across the three maternal groups (23.83 ± 4.07 ng/mL for controls, 22.73 ± 3.92 ng/mL for eclampsia, and 22.22 ± 3.53 ng/mL for preeclampsia; p = 0.079). Furthermore, the specific intensity of the mother's preeclampsia did not dictate any shifts in the newborn's vitamin B12 or folate profiles. A robust positive correlation linked maternal and infant serum vitamin B12 across every single clinical category evaluated (p < 0.001). Maternal and fetal folate levels also shared a positive correlation strictly within the preeclamptic cohort. Conclusion: This research highlighted that newborns exposed to maternal preeclampsia and eclampsia retain notably higher serum vitamin B12 levels than infants born to normotensive women. Meanwhile, umbilical cord folate pools remained relatively uniform regardless of the mother's blood pressure status or the severity of her hypertensive disease.