Seeking Biomarkers of Early Childhood Malnutrition's Long-term Effects.

This article describes a research collaboration involving scientists from five centers in Barbados, China, Cuba and the USA. It builds on longer-term joint work between the Barbados Nutrition Study (which, over a 45-year span, has extensively documented nutritional, health, behavioral, social and economic outcomes of individuals who experienced protein-energy malnutrition in the first year of life and healthy controls from the same classrooms and neighborhoods) and the Cuban Neuroscience Center (which has developed low-cost brain imaging methods that can be readily used in low income settings to identify biomarkers for early detection and treatment of adverse consequences of childhood malnutrition). This collaboration, which involved Barbadian, Cuban and US scientists began in the 1970s, when quantitative EEG techniques were applied to EEG data collected in 1977-78, at which time study participants were aged 5-11 years. These EEG records were never fully analyzed but were stored in New York and made available to this project in 2016. These data have now been processed and analyzed, comparing EEG findings in previously malnourished and control children, and have led to the identification of early biomarkers of long-term effects of early childhood protein-energy malnutrition. The next stage of the project will involve extending earlier work by collecting EEG recordings in the same individuals at ages 45-51 years, 40 years later, and comparing findings to earlier data and to the...
Source: MEDICC Review - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Tags: MEDICC Rev Source Type: research