Short People

This new paper in Nature looks at a study in Bangladesh funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation.

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 incomes...

A picture slowly emerged that being too short early in life is a sign of adverse conditions — such as poor diet and regular bouts of diarrhoeal disease — and a predictor for intellectual deficits and mortality. But not all stunted growth, which affects an estimated 160 million children worldwide, is connected with these bad outcomes. Now, researchers are trying to untangle the links between growth and neurological development. Is bad nutrition alone the culprit? What about emotional neglect, infectious disease or other challenges?

Shahria Hafiz Kakon is at the front line trying to answer these questions in the slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where about 40% of children have stunted growth by the age of two. As a medical officer at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) in Dhaka, she is leading the first-ever brain-imaging study of children with stunted growth. “It is a very new idea in Bangladesh to do brain-imaging studies,” says Kakon.

Nutritional interventions are known to reduce the growth and other deficits by about 1/3, but disease and other concomitants of poverty are thought to be responsible for the rest. Other interventions are being tested, but cost is a huge factor in poor countries.

Economic development is probably the best long term cure, but starting with healthier bodies and brains has got to help.

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