Nutrition's Role in Feeding Children's Brains

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Nutrition's Role in Feeding Children's Brains

 

 

Provided by Agricultural Research on 12/28/2003

by Core, Jim

 

 

 

 

 

 

Originally Published:20031201.

Research into how children metabolize the nourishment they receive aims to help

young minds reach their full potential later in life.

Many factors affect how our brains develop from an early age. Nutrition and diet

are obviously important. But to more than 200,000 infants born each year in the

United States, a mysterious condition is holding them back. They're normal

children in most ways, but unknown factors hinder their growth, and they begin

to fall behind their peers in learning.

" Failure to Thrive " is a term used by pediatricians to describe this condition

in which a child has an abnormally low weight for his or her age or has an

abnormally low weight gain over time. Unlike some children who simply don't grow

as tall as their peers, FTT children can't make use of adequate nutrition to

gain weight and grow as expected. It is not a specific disease but a general

diagnosis with many possible causes. In most studies, children who didn't have a

low birth weight but who fall into the lowest 5 percent later on in weight

measures are classified as FTT. A main question is whether FTT is a disorder

that blocks or interferes with the absorption of nutrients or if it is caused by

lower than normal food intake.

It's not known exactly when FTT develops. Science hasn't determined whether it

occurs in the womb or during the early years of infancy and toddlerhood.

Children who were born prematurely and those who were carried to full term can

be diagnosed with the condition. It's known that nutrition can permanently

affect physical growth, brain structure, and function, but precisely how this

happens is not well understood.

Poor nutrition during the first 3 years often permanently hampers a child's

mental development. Some children start out growing well but over time begin to

fall off, both in weight gain and then in height. If the condition progresses,

FTT children may become apathetic and irritable and may not reach milestones,

such as sitting up or walking at the usual age. It is possible that FTT children

don't process needed nutrients as efficiently as non-FTT children and that this

results in central nervous system defects, such as hyperactivity and disorders

of attention and learning.

Researchers at the Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center (ACNC) in Little Rock,

Arkansas, are interested in how children diagnosed with FTT process what they

eat and how the brain is affected. ACNC is managed in cooperation with ARS and

the Arkansas Children's Hospital. Roscoe A. Dykman and Terry Pivik are

psychophysiologists at the center's Brain Functions Laboratory. With the support

and collaboration of Dr. Patrick Casey, director of the FTT Clinic at the

hospital, they're studying the effects of food intake on FTT in children and

trying to find biochemical indicators that can be used to identify FTT children

at an early age.

What's Going Wrong?

Researchers recruited infants and toddlers 6-20 months of age for a study of

growth-retarded and normally developing children. Parents were asked to measure

and report exactly what and how much their children ate over a period of 3 days.

This information was then processed with a computer program known as the

Minnesota Nutrition Data System, a nutrient calculation/diet assessment tool

that converts amounts of foods reported to gram weights and calculates the total

proteins, calories, and fat and other nutrient information.

" We found FTT children were eating more than the study's control group,

regardless of their lower weight, " Dykman says. " Food availability was not an

issue. We found that food in FTT children wasn't having the effect it was

supposed to have. FTT children were provided adequate diets, but they apparently

processed the food differently. "

Dykman says that reports in the scientific literature suggest that FTT children

need to consume far more calories to grow than is the case for normally growing

children. And these studies do show that an increased intake improves growth of

infants and toddlers. But there is no evidence that these positive changes are

sustained over time.

Dykman believes nutrients may not be processed in the same way by FTT kids as

they are in normal children. " We determined that even though growth-retarded

children consumed more food than the control group did, they were smaller and

scored lower on development tests of mental and motor skills, " Dykman says.

" Blood chemistry analyses showed differences between the two groups in 8 of 29

nutrients-all 8 of which were involved in different aspects of bone growth. This

suggests that the metabolism of FTT children is different and that they require

either greater food intake or different foods than normally growing children

do. "

For example, ACNC researchers found that though FTT children's bodies are not

usually iron deficient, they have an abnormally high capacity to bind iron in

their blood and make it unavailable. Such findings could be clues to the

problems with mental and physical growth that these children face.

Now that they have a baseline database of what FTT children eat, ACNC

researchers are working to develop new diets that promote brain development and

function in babies born before full term. These diets could help these children

maximize their growth and learning potential.

Food for Thought

Dykman and Pivik believe that nutritional deficits occurring during early

development may be associated with long-term effects on the processing of

language-related information. Evidence of this was provided in a study of 8- to

15-year-old growth-retarded children, diagnosed with FTT before the age of 3,

and normal (control) children in the same age range.

They found that many children, particularly boys, have difficulties with

reading, spelling, and arithmetic as they age. They also found, by measuring

brainwave responses, that the children who developed normally were more

efficient at processing information. FTT children had slower word recognition

than controls and were shown to question their own decisions during testing,

indicating an element of uncertainty in information processing.

A second study on these same subjects used a task that was originally designed

to test the vigilance/attentiveness of radar operators. The children pressed a

reaction time key every time the letter A occurred followed by the letter X on a

television screen as their brain activity was monitored. They were told not to

press the key for anything but this sequence (not A alone, X alone, or any other

letter). Researchers call the restraint people need to have in controlling their

desire to respond to a stimulus the " no-go response. " The brain is responding

with response inhibition so that the child doesn't push the button. Though the

number of errors made by the two groups did not differ, researchers found that

the FTT children's brainwaves were different from those of the control subjects

during the time when they had to decide to react or not.

This difference was seen in what is known as a long latency brainwave. The

researchers found reduced responses to stimuli in growth-retarded subjects in

brain areas involved in attention and language processing. This evidence points

to the brain's frontal lobe as a factor in FTT. Dykman says the frontal lobe is

involved with behavior, social judgment, reasoning, planning, speech and

movement, emotions, and problem-solving (important functions that are referred

to by psychologists as " executive functions " ). This study suggests that

nutritional problems occurring earlier in life may have subtle effects later in

an area of the brain that controls much of our behavior, thought, and emotion.

It was thought for a long time that a mother's relationship with her child, her

intelligence, the socio-economic status of the family, and the level of care for

children were the main factors leading to FTT. But Dykman says their results, as

well as those of others, contradict this. Neglect of any kind is not an issue in

most cases. Studies by Dykman and Pivik showed there weren't significant

differences in the social status of families or in the IQs (intelligence

quotients) of parents with FTT children. It is likely, however, that these home

environmental factors do, in fact, have some effect, but it is very small

compared to nutritional status and to biological variables such as inherited

physiological and biochemical anomalies, parental size, and virus infections

early in life.

Also, the same parents can have both normally growing and FTT children. Dykman

believes studying these families could provide some insight into FTT's causes

and help show why some children are born with or acquire this condition.-By Jim

Core, ARS.

This research is part of Human Nutrition, an ARS National Program (#107)

described on the World Wide Web at www.nps.ars.usda.gov.

Roscoe A. Dykman and R. Terry Pivik are with the Arkansas Children's Nutrition

Center and the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, 1120 Marshall St., Little

Rock, AR 72202; phone (501) 364-3342 [Dykman], (501) 364-3346 [Pivik], fax (501)

364-3947, e-mail dykmanroscoea, pivikterry.

 

 

© 2003 Agricultural Research. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company;

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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