Neurocognitive Benefits of Maternal Thiamine Supplementation for Breastfed Cambodian Infants
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Women reliant on rice-heavy diets can have inadequate thiamine intakes, placing breastfed infants at risk of thiamine deficiency and, in turn, neurocognitive impairments. We investigated the impact of maternal thiamine supplementation doses on infants’ cognitive, motor, and language development across the first year. In this double-blind, four-parallel arm, randomized controlled trial, healthy mothers of exclusively breastfed newborn infants were recruited in Kampong Thom, Cambodia. At 2-weeks postnatal, women (n = 335) were randomized to one of four treatment groups to consume one capsule/day with varying amounts of thiamine for 22 weeks: 0 mg, 1.2 mg, 2.4 mg, and 10 mg. At 2-, 12-, 24- and 52-weeks of age, infants were assessed with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL). Mixed effects modeling suggest that by 6 months of age, the highest maternal thiamine dose (10 mg/day) held significant benefits for infants’ language development, F's (3,659) > 33.2, P's < 0.001, but generally not for motor or visual reception development. Despite having achieved standardized scores on the MSEL that approximated US norms by 6 months, infants showed a significant drop in all cognitive domains following trial completion, indicating that nutritional interventions beyond 6 months may be necessary. Findings provide the first experimental evidence that thiamine supplementation among lactating mothers at risk of thiamine deficiency protects their infants’ neurocognitive development, with particular benefit to developing language capacities. Results are consistent with studies that report a widening gap in cognitive test scores over time between children from high vs. low-risk contexts. Important questions remain, particularly with respect to the appropriate duration of thiamine supplementation and/or alternate interventions such as mandatory fortification, with potential to build protective stores of thiamine in preconception or pregnancy. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences (Opportunity ID OPP1176128).
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".