Studies from around the world – carried out in Kenya, Brazil, the Philippines, Jamaica, Zimbabwe … – suggest that there is a connection between poor growth in children living in poor areas – caused mainly by malnutrition – and worse results both in tests cognitive as in school results . The most recent of these is in Bangladesh, where around 40% of youngsters are stunted.
These investigations are based on a previous one, carried out in the 1960s in Guatemala. There, a team of scientists distributed a nutritional supplement to young children from rural families because they theorized that supplying them with protein in their first three years of life would improve their growth options.
And so it was: they grew between one and two centimeters more than those other children who had been part of the control group. But what is more: those who received these additional supplements also obtained better scores in the reading and knowledge tests that were given later, as adolescents; and when the researchers returned to the site in the 2000s, those girls – who were already women – had accumulated more years of schooling and those boys – who were already men – had more economic income in the exercise of their jobs.
According to all these studies, a growth retardation was a sign of a poor diet and regular episodes of diarrheal diseases at an early age and could predict later intellectual deficits.
But can all the blame be put on poor diet? There are studies, such as one carried out in 2000 in orphanages in Romania, that suggest that brain development in babies – who in the Romanian case were well fed but spent the day lying in their crib, looking at the ceiling and without interacting with anyone – could also be affected by the lack of social and emotional stimuli, since this circumstance would lead to long-term cognitive problems.
An innovative study in Bangladesh
This is not the case for the children of Dhaka, in Bangladesh, who live surrounded by large families, but with the slab of malnutrition and an environment in which the lack of hygiene is evident . Researcher Shahria Hafiz Kakon, who is part of the International Center for Research on Diarrheal Diseases in Dhaka, is leading an innovative study in the most deprived neighborhoods of this locality to study how these negative factors could influence brain development. To draw his conclusions, and in collaboration with other colleagues, such as pediatric neuroscientist Charles Nelson, he is performing and analyzing brain images of children affected by this growth problem.
The study – funded by the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – is one of the first to study how the brains of infants and children in developing countries respond to adversity , and it hopes provide important information about your growth and cognitive performance.
To do this, they have carried out magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests on twelve babies of two to three months of age with a deficit in their growth and, as happens with Romanian orphans or children who grow up poor in developed countries , identified a lower gray matter volume than in the control group used for the study. In addition, the scientists associated having less gray matter with worse scores on language and visual memory tests at six months of age.
They also subjected about 130 36-month-old children to functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRs) tests and detected different patterns in brain activity in those who suffered from growth retardation and other adversities.
Adversities leave a mark
Moreover, the electroencephalograms (EEG) carried out revealed increased electrical activity among the stunted children in Dhaka – to the surprise of the researchers, because normally, in other studies with orphans and poor children from other parts of the world , said activity was moderate.
Nelson’s team believes the differences could lie in the different kinds of adversities these little ones in Bangladesh face every day: such as food insecurity, infections from intestinal pathogens and mothers with high rates of depression.
Detecting which of these adversities are the ones that most influence the differences that they have appreciated in brain activity among the children of Dhaka is very important, because facing them could be as important for the good cognitive development of the little ones as ensuring that they have good nutrition. The researchers hope they can continue to draw important conclusions from this study by monitoring the children who are participating in it.
