Effects of an energy and micronutrient supplement on mental development and behavior under natural conditions in undernourished children in Indonesia.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Micronutrients, published as a randomized controlled trial.

This paper reports the effects of an energy and micronutrient supplement on mental development and on the social cognitive and emotionally regulatory behaviors of nutritionally at risk infants and toddlers in Pangalengan, Indonesia.

Motor development was assessed with the Bayley Scale and with a custom-made scale to assess gross motor development leading to bipedal locomotion.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as infants and young children, both men and women.

A 12-month-old (N = 53) and an 18-month-old (N = 83) cohort were recruited from day-care-centers.

Twenty children who received S belonged to the 12- and 18-month-old cohort.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Micronutrients and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

The sites were six tea plantations in Pangalengan, West Java.

Inclusion criteria were: no chronic disease; length-for-age < or = -1 standard deviation (s.d.) and weight-for-length between -1 and -2 s.d. of the median of the reference of the World Health Organization.

Evaluations of intake were made at baseline and every 2 months thereafter.

Four hours of continuous observations were made of the child's interaction with the social and physical environment.

What Was Measured

The subject headings attached to it are Anemia, Iron-Deficiency, Behavior, Brain, Child Development, Child Welfare, Cognition and Cohort Studies.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Micronutrients.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 2 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2000 (European journal of clinical nutrition), a journal based in England.

More context: all human trials.