Folic Acid

(asked on 13th July 2015) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what progress has been made in establishing a laboratory in the United Kingdom able to conduct blood folate status analysis.


This question was answered on 27th July 2015

An international expert workshop recommended in 2008 that blood folate analysis in the United Kingdom should move to mass spectrometry-based methods for both measures of blood folate used in the National Diet and Nutrition Survey; total serum folate and whole blood folate.

The Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Research unit have been setting up the mass-spectrometry method for total serum folate in their laboratories in Cambridge over the last few months, working closely with the leading international experts on folate analysis at the Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States.

Reticulating Splines