Stimulating play helps growth-stunted kids

Mental and social stimulation through play early in life appears to have lasting benefits in poorly nourished children with growth retardation.

According to a study in The Lancet this week, mental stimulation at 9 to 24 months of age among a group of growth-stunted Jamaican children led to improved cognitive function and better academic performance in high school.

In this study, “home visits for mothers and children by community health workers trained to demonstrate stimulation activities and encourage mother-child interaction improved the development of undernourished children,” Dr. Susan Walker who led the study told Reuters Health.

“This early childhood intervention had sustained benefits for ability at age 18 years and reduced school dropout,” added Walker, who is with the University of West Indies in Jamaica.

In developing countries, poor nutrition early in life, either before or after birth, or both, causes stunting in one third of all children younger than age 5. Children with stunted growth early in life have cognitive difficulties and perform poorly at school later in life.

In 1991, Walker and colleagues published the results of an initial 2-year study of 129 stunted Jamaican children, which showed that two types of intervention—nutritional support in the form of 1 kg of milk-based formula per week and psychosocial stimulation—was associated with improved cognitive development.

The researchers who have been following the children ever since now report that the early cognitive benefits of psychosocial stimulation are sustained.

Compared with growth-stunted children who received no intervention, those who enjoyed stimulating play as toddlers had higher IQ scores and higher reading and math test scores at age 17 and 18 years. Non-stimulated growth-stunted children had marked deficits in reading and math and were more likely to drop out of school.

The early benefits of nutritional support alone, however, were not sustained.

But Dr. Inga Thorsdottir from the University of Iceland suggests in a commentary in The Lancet that the level of nutritional support may have been too low to elicit sustained benefits.

Summing up, Walker and colleagues say their findings “emphasize the need to increase efforts to prevent childhood growth retardation” and show that “important benefits can be achieved for children who are already undernourished through early childhood stimulation.”

According to Thorsdottir, finding ways to reduce the incidence of childhood growth retardation and to improve brain function and educational attainment is “very important, both for individuals’ quality of life and for the economics of developing countries.”

SOURCE: The Lancet October 19, 2005.

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