Vitamin D and Calcium Hormones in Pregnancy

Abstract

There is no time of life, and there are few diseases, in which such massive shifts in calcium occur so regularly as during pregnancy. Fetal bone formation demands that 25 to 30 g of calcium be deposited in the fetal skeleton, almost all of it during the second half of gestation. To prepare for this process and for the losses of calcium that occur with lactation, maternal calcium accretion begins early in pregnancy. Well before the major fetal ossification of late pregnancy, intestinal absorption of calcium is enhanced in the mother and her bone mass increases, a unique event in . . .