Early Childhood Stunting Is Associated With Lower Developmental Levels in the Subsequent Generation of Children

If children are exposed to a lack of vitamins, minerals and trace elements during their first months of life, their physical, mental and social growth can be irreversibly delayed in later life. For the first time scientists found evidence in Jamaica that these developmental disorders could be passed on to their children by parents who had suffered from hunger in their early childhood. Therefore, the development of 89 children of stunted and normally developed parents was compared between the first and the sixth year of life.

The Griffiths Mental Development Scales (GMDS) were used as a measure of evaluation for the course. With this scale the state of development as a whole and in five functional areas can be differentiated:

• motivity
• social behavior
• receptive and expressive language
• eye and hand coordination
• cognitive performance

On average and above all with regard to their cognitive performance the children of stunted parents performed significantly worse than children of normally developed parents and had also a much lower life expectancy.

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SP Walker et al. Early childhood stunting is associated with lower developmental levels in the subsequent generation of children. J Nutr. 2015; 145: 823–828. Available online via: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25833785