Fig 1.
Flow chart of study- population and design.
1 Not all women from the source population were asked to participate in the study while still pregnant, partly for practical reasons and partly due to exclusion criteria (unable to understand Norwegian). 2 2 BS and 16 FFQ missing at random or passive dropout. 3 Women recruited 2–6 weeks postpartum to restrict selection bias as not the whole source population was asked to participate during pregnancy due to practical reasons. 4 Passive drop-out sometime between T1 and T2. 5 18 BS and 16 FFQ missing at random or passive drop-out. 6 21 BS and 21 FFQ missing at random or passive drop-out. 7 30 BS and 26 FFQ missing at random or passive drop-out. BS: blood sample; FFQ: food frequency questionnaire.
Table 1.
Descriptive, socio-economic and behavioral characteristics of study participants (T1 n = 55, T2 n = 92, T3 = 82 and T4 = 78).
Table 2.
Fatty acid status of red blood cells in relative and absolute (μg/g) amounts measured in gestational week 28 (T1), 3- (T2), 6- (T3) and 12 months (T4) postpartum1.
Different letter indicate statistically different values.
Table 3.
Fatty acid status of red blood cells in relative and absolute (μg/g) amounts measured in gestational week 28 (T1), 3- (T2), 6- (T3) and 12 months (T4) postpartum, for linoleic acid (18:2n-6 LA) arachidonic acid (20:4n-6 AA) and docosahexaenoic acid (22:6n-3 DHA), comparing those participants that provided a sample at all four time points (A, n = 35) and those that did not (B).
Fig 2.
Repeated measurements of RBC FA status from pregnancy until 12 months postpartum.
Panel A shows a heat map visualizing the abundance values of the FA across the repeated measurement. Red represents higher values and green represent lower values. A dendrogram on the left hand side of the heat map indicates similarity in the change over time in abundance profiles. Panel B, C and D represent raw data (yellow) of individually growth trajectories for B: 22:6n3 in RBC (μg/g); C: 18:2n6 RBC (μg/g); and D: 20:4n6 RBC (μg/g), measured in the 28th gestational week (T1) and 3- (T2), 6- (T3) and 12 months (T4) postpartum. The black lines are locally weighted regression (lowess) lines that “smooth” the overall variability in each of the three datasets and provide an unbiased glimpse of the average trend in the data. The red triangles represent the population mean at each timepoint. T1 (28th gestational week), T2 (three months postpartum), T3 (six months postpartum), T4 (twelve months postpartum).