ABSTRACT
Vitamin D is essential for the growth and development of the human skeleton throughout the life cycle [1]. There is considerable speculation regarding the potential effects of vitamin D on both skeletal and extraskeletal aspects of reproductive physiology and fetal development, yet it remains unknown whether there are benefits to improving maternal antenatal vitamin D status beyond the correction of severe deficiency [2,3]. Clinical trials employing vitamin D dose regimens that safely optimize maternal-fetal vitamin D status will enable testing of these hypotheses [4]. However, very few studies have rigorously addressed vitamin D supplementation during pregnancy, and the single-dose vitamin D3 pregnancy trials published to date have provided little insight into pharmacokinetics
or safety [5,6]. Moreover, there is a near complete absence of pharmacological data in South Asia, where the vitamin D status of pregnant women [7] and young infants [8] is poor in spite of the tropical climate.
