Impact of a nutritional supplement during gestation and early childhood on child salivary cortisol, hair cortisol, and telomere length at 4-6 years of age: a follow-up of a randomized controlled trial.

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Copper (Supplement), published as a randomized controlled trial.

Their objective was to evaluate the long-term effect of nutritional supplementation during gestation and early childhood on child cortisol and buccal telomere length (a marker of cellular aging) at 4-6 years of age.

Why It Was Studied

Dysregulation of the stress response can occur early in life and may be affected by nutrition.

The researchers conducted a follow-up study of children born to women who participated in a nutritional supplementation trial in Ghana.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 364 children taking part.

The age groups tagged for this paper are infants, young children, children and teenagers, women only.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Copper (Supplement) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

What Was Measured

At age 4-6 years, the researchers measured hair cortisol, buccal telomere length, and salivary cortisol before and after a stressor.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Dietary Supplements, Ghana, Hydrocortisone, Micronutrients, Stress, Psychological and Telomere.

Author keywords: Cortisol, child, nutrition, pregnancy and telomere length.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of Copper (Supplement) in 364 children.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

The publication is from 2020 (Stress (Amsterdam, Netherlands)), a journal based in England.

More context: the Copper (Supplement) compound page, all human trials.