How poverty affects the brain


Source: Nature



In the late 1960s, a team of researchers began doling out a nutritional supplement to families with young children in rural Guatemala. They were testing the assumption that providing enough protein in the first few years of life would reduce the incidence of stunted growth.

It did. Children who got supplements grew 1 to 2 centimetres taller than those in a control group. But the benefits didn't stop there. The children who received added nutrition went on to score higher on reading and knowledge tests as adolescents, and when researchers returned in the early 2000s, women who had received the supplements in the first three years of life completed more years of schooling and men had higher incomes1.

“Had there not been these follow-ups, this study probably would have been largely forgotten,” says Reynaldo Martorell, a specialist in maternal and child nutrition at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who led the follow-up studies. Instead, he says, the findings made financial institutions such as the World Bank think of early nutritional interventions as long-term investments in human health.



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LINK:
http://www.nature.com/news/how-poverty-affects-the-brain-1.22280?WT.mc_id=SFB_NNEWS_1508_RHBox