STUNTED children are more likely to get distracted easily, a study suggests.
Kids who are too short for their age see differences in how well their brains work from as early as six months old, British researchers found.
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Professor John Spencer, of the University of East Anglia, said: “We expected that poor growth might impact cognition, but it was striking to see this at the level of brain function.
“Typically-developing infants in our study showed engagement of a working memory brain network — and this brain activity predicted cognitive outcomes one year later.
“But the stunted infants showed a very different pattern suggesting that they were quite distractible.”
Stunted growth refers to when a child does not grow as much as expected because of poor nutrition, infections or other external factors.
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It is more common in developing countries, with 85 per cent of all stunted children living in Africa and Asia, but occurs in the UK as well.
A report by the Food Foundation last year found stunting is increasing in Britain, with poorer families disproportionately affected.
Previous research has shown it can lead to poorer brain performance in later life, including at school.
The latest study, published in Nature Human Behaviour, is the first to look at how it impacts brain power in infancy.
Researchers studied the brains of 200 children to see how stunting affected activity in different regions of the organ at six and nine months.
Children with stunted growth showed lower activity in parts of the brain linked to attention and memory at both stages, results showed.
Dr Sobana Wijeakumar, of the University of Nottingham, said: “Distractibility was associated with a brain network typically involved in the allocation of attention to objects or tasks.
“The network is also involved in suppressing distraction, and maintaining items in working memory.”