Dr Anand Chokkalingam, University of California, Berkeley

The vitamin folate is essential for healthy foetal development.

Evidence from laboratory and epidemiology studies implicates folate in childhood leukaemia risk.

However, perhaps due to the complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors, as well as the common use of indirect assessments of foetal folate exposure such as maternal dietary intake, the precise role of folate in childhood leukaemia development has proved hard to pinpoint.

Foetal exposure to folate is affected not only by maternal dietary intake of the vitamin but also by genetic differences in folate transport and metabolism in both the mother and the developing foetus.

Dr Chokkalingam and colleagues, working as part of the extensive Northern California Childhood Leukemia Study, will analyse blood spots collected at birth from more than 900 case and control children to see if a child’s birth folate levels are associated with risk of ALL.

In addition, they will assess how the mother’s dietary folate intake, the mother’s folate genes, and the child’s folate genes all impact on the child’s birth folate levels, to elucidate the mechanisms by which these factors may independently influence risk of childhood leukaemia.

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