Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
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Query: UMLS:C0020538 (hypertension)
 170,190 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

We investigated geophagia in the black population of rural Holmes County, Mississippi. Twenty-five sources of geophagical clays were located and most of the sources are associated with rural settlements throughout the county. Clays are taken from subsurface soil horizons, and all but one of the sources come from the upland portion of the county. Geophagia occurs among 57% of women and 16% of children of both sexes, but it is not found among adult males or adolescents. Average daily comsumption of clay is 50 g. Our data indicate geophagia is not correlated with hunger, anemia, or helminthic problems, but it may contribute to the common problem of hypertension. Geophagia has been suggested as one of the factors leading to hyperkalemia, but our data do not support this notion.
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PMID:Geophagia in rural Mississippi: environmental and cultural contexts and nutritional implications. 48 31

Since antiquity, there have been references in medicine to the role of nutrition in pregnancy outcome. Reviewing articles on nutrition and drug supplementation in pregnancy, one is struck by the variety of remedies that have been tried and the variety of effects that have been attributed to them. The number of herbal remedies that have been touted is astounding, and the entire science of Geophagia evolved in the hope identifying of those population-specific customs that may have had a positive effect on birth outcome as an adaptive mechanism. Most recently, there has been renewed interest in the role of nutritional and drug supplementation in pregnancy, specifically in the areas of pregnancy-induced hypertension and teratogenesis. In this article, I briefly review the role of drug supplementation in pregnancy, ranging from established needs such as iron to prevent iron-deficiency anemia to the controversies of low-dose aspirin supplementation for the prevention of preeclampsia and preconceptional folic acid supplementation for the prevention of neural tube defects.
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PMID:Drug supplementation in pregnancy. 145 Mar 42