Consequences of early life exposure to the 1983–1985 Ethiopian Great Famine on cognitive function in adults: a historical cohort study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: To investigate the association between early life famine exposure and cognitive function in adults. DESIGN: Historical cohort study SETTING: North Wollo Zone, Northeast Ethiopia. PARTICIPANTS: We recruited 1047 adult men and women aged 30-38 years who had history of early life exposure to Ethiopian great famine. Based on self-reported age and birth date, participants were categorised into famine exposed in early life (prenatal/postnatal) and non-exposed groups. OUTCOME MEASURES: The primary outcome measure of this study was cognitive function in adults after early life exposure to famine. Cognitive function was measured using Montreal Cognitive Assessment-basic. Associations between exposure and outcome variables were examined by linear regression analysis models. RESULTS: Adjusted for covariates, early life exposure to famine showed 1.29 (β=-1.29; 95% CI -2.16 to -0.52) points lower cognitive function score compared with non-exposed. Based on subanalysis for timing of famine exposure, postnatal exposure to famine resulted in 2.26 (β=-2.26; 95% CI -3.12 to -1.36) points lower cognitive function score compared with non-exposed groups. Prenatal famine exposure had 1.26 (β=-1.26; 95% CI -2.35 to 0.94) points lower cognitive function score although not statistically significant. CONCLUSIONS: Famine exposure in early life was associated with cognitive functions in adults. While the overall findings highlight the importance of optimal nutrition in early life for brain growth and development, the association observed between postnatal famine exposure and adult cognitive function may indicate the relative importance of learning and experience during early childhood for optimal brain development after birth. Further studies are needed to elucidate the potential mechanism behind this association.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".