Effects of an energy and micronutrient supplement on play behavior 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 supplementation on quantitative and qualitative aspects of play among poorly nourished children.

At issue is whether the supplement led to a progression in complexity of play.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 55 children taking part.

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

The present study utilized a subsample of 55 children recruited for the larger Pangalengan project 6 months into the study.

Thirty-eight children were recruited late enough to allow for longitudinal observations.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

The children were allocated by chance, so the Micronutrients group and the comparison group should start out alike.

Evaluations of play behavior were repeated four times.

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

The remaining cases were used for cross sectional observations only.

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.

The children were videotaped during play.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Brain, Child Development, Cognition, Cross-Cultural Comparison, Dietary Supplements, Energy Intake and Indonesia.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Micronutrients in 55 children.

Results are reported in around 4 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

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

More context: all human trials.