It was a very different story 25 years later, when one of those scientists, Reynaldo Martorell, and a new team tracked down many of the adults who had participated as children. The atole, they found, had made a dramatic difference after all, but only for the volunteers who had been toddlers and babies when they began drinking it every day.
That follow-up study is now a model for a new, federally-funded Canadian program called Saving Brains that will direct $10-million to researchers who want to assess the long-term impact of interventions in early childhood. The aim is to find effective ways to encourage healthy brain development, because smarter kids have a better chance of breaking the cycle of poverty.
More than 200 million children in developing countries have their cognitive development limited by disease, malnutrition, birth complications and a lack of nurturing and stimulation, says Karlee Silver, who leads Grand Challenges Canada’s Saving Brains initiative.
Grand Challenges Canada is an independent not-for-profit organization launched earlier this year using federal funds. It works in a consortium with Canada’s International Development Research Centre and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Two dozen research proposals for the Saving Brains program have made the short list and of those, 10 or 12 will likely get funded.
The initial study in Guatemala was done by the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama. The original hypothesis was that protein supplementation would improve mental development.
“There was quite a bit of disappointment that by the end of the study, in 1977. The effects were modest at best,” says Dr. Martorell.
But the extra protein had made a difference in the children’s growth, especially in the head circumference of the youngsters who were under two. That’s why Dr. Martorell suspected it might have had a long-term impact on their brains.
“I began to wonder what happened to those kids.”
When he and his colleagues went back to Guatemala to find out, they discovered that the children who were under the age of 3 when they started drinking the atole every day had benefitted after all. They had stayed in school longer and, once they entered the work force, earned on average 46 per cent more in wages than the children who were older than 3 when they started consuming the warm gruel every day. This suggested there was a window during the first three years of life during which extra dietary protein can encourage healthy brain development, says Dr. Martorell.
Now at Emory University in Atlanta, Dr. Martorell has acted as adviser to the Saving Brains initiative and was in Ottawa recently to talk to the researchers who are applying for funding.
He described how to track down adults who took part in research programs as children. In Guatemala, the scientists hired the same local supervisors who had helped in the original study. They were able to obtain economic data from 60 per cent of the 2,392 children who had been enrolled in the initial study. They published their findings in 2008 in the medical journal Lancet.
There is already compelling evidence that the best time for interventions to encourage healthy brain development is when a baby is in the womb, or during the first few years of life.
But the follow-up studies to be funded by the Saving Brains initiative may identify narrow windows during these early years in which particular interventions are most effective, says Dr. Martorell.
Researchers have proposed looking at whether treating infections has an impact on brain development, and if programs that encourage mothers to nurture and stimulate their babies and young children can lead to significant long-term gains.
Dr. Martorell says he is glad he followed up on his original hunch about the long-term benefits of atole.
“Without the follow-up, that study would been largely forgotten,” he says.
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