Early nutrition in infants is linked to higher IQ in adulthood A new study has shown that early nutrition has a long-term effect on a baby's developing brain.
The research team from Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the UCL Institute of Child Health found that pre-term infants fed enriched milk in their early weeks had a higher IQ in adulthood.
Researchers say the study is one of the first to show that the development of the brain can be influenced by early nutrition.
"It is not clear whether this just relates to preterm infants, who have very specific development issues," BBC quoted lead researcher Dr Elizabeth Isaacs, as saying.
"But, obviously the next question would be if there are any wider implications, both for feeding beyond those first few weeks, and for babies who are born at term," she added.
The researchers followed a group of children born several weeks prematurely in the 1980s and who were at the time randomly assigned for four weeks either a high nutrient diet (formula milk with high fat and protein and micronutrient content), or formula or breast milk.
At 18 months and again at around the age of seven or eight, the children underwent developmental and IQ tests. At both stages the children who had been given the high-nutrient milk performed better. At age eight, the verbal IQ skills of the boys in the high nutrient group were 12 points higher than the boys in the standard nutrient group.
Isaacs said it was possible that the high nutrient diet simply enabled the pre-term babies' developing brains to reach their full potential, or protected them from damage following the premature birth.
In the latest analysis, carried out when the babies were aged about 16, there was a wider gap between the girls fed the standard version and their enriched counterparts, of nine points, than there was between the boys, which had narrowed to seven.
But this time, in addition to IQ tests, researchers also took scans of the children's brains in an attempt to elucidate these variations.
They found considerable differences between the two groups in the size of the caudate nucleus - a part of the brain associated with memory and learning.
They speculated that this could explain the differences seen, particularly given that there were no particularly striking variations in other key areas of the brain between the two groups.
The researchers say, "The fact that early nutrition may programme the development of specific brain structures is of fundamental biological importance. Although studies are beginning to appear that link aspects of current diet to brain function, the data presented here is among the first to show that the structure of the brain can be influenced by early nutrition in humans."
The study is published in Pediatric Research.
Music heals
Listening to music speeds up stroke patients' recovery Researchers from Finland have found that listening to music in the early stages after a stroke can improve patients' recovery.
They found that if stroke patients listened to music for a couple of hours a day, their verbal memory and focused attention recovered better and they had a more positive mood than patients who did not listen to anything or who listened to audio books.
Teppo Sarkamo, a PhD student at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Department of Psychology, at the University of Helsinki and at the Helsinki Brain Research Centre, the first author of the study, studied patients who had suffered a stroke of the left or right hemisphere middle cerebral artery (MCA).
Sarkamo and colleagues involved 60 patients to the single-blind, randomised, controlled trial between March 2004 and May 2006 and started to work with them, as soon as possible, after they had been admitted to hospital.
"We thought that it was important to start the listening as soon as possible during the acute post-stroke stage, as the brain can undergo dramatic changes during the first weeks and months of recovery and we know these changes can be enhanced by stimulation from the environment," Sarkamo said.
As a result of the stroke, most of the patients had problems with movement and with cognitive processes, such as attention and memory.
The researchers randomly assigned them to a music listening group, a language group or a control group.
During the next two months the music and language groups listened daily to music or to audio books respectively, while the control group received no listening material. All groups received standard stroke rehabilitation.
"We found that three months after the stroke, verbal memory improved from the first week post-stroke by 60 per cent in music listeners, by 18 per cent in audio book listeners and by 29 per cent in non-listeners," Sarkamo said.
"Similarly, focused attention improved by 17 per cent in music listeners, but no improvement was observed in audio book listeners and non-listeners. These differences were still essentially the same six months after the stroke," Sarkamo added.
Also, the researchers found that the music listening group experienced less depressed and confused mood than the patients in the control group.
"These differences in cognitive recovery can be directly attributed to the effect of listening to music," Sarkamo said.
"Furthermore, the fact that most of the music (63 per cent) also contained lyrics would suggest that it is the musical component (or the combination of music and voice) that plays a crucial role in the patients' improved recovery. I would like to emphasise the fact that this is a novel finding made in a single study that is promising but will have to be replicated and studied further in future studies to better understand the underlying neural mechanisms," Sarkamo added.
The study is published online in the medical journal Brain.
