Benefits of Maternal Thiamine Supplementation for Enhancing Cambodian Infants’ Social Responsiveness at 24 Weeks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Infants in Cambodia are at risk for thiamine deficiency, with long-term negative consequences for neuro-cognitive development. We investigated the extent to which maternal thiamine supplementation enhances infants’ responsiveness to social engagement. Such responsiveness is both indicative of neuro-cognitive development and beneficial for subsequent neuro-cognitive progress. 335 lactating Cambodian mothers were randomly assigned to receive a capsule containing 0, 1.2, 2.4, or 10 mg of thiamine daily from 2- until 24-weeks postnatal. We assessed infants’ social responsiveness via a new method – the Primary Engagement Task (PET) – when infants were 2-, 12-, and 24-weeks. In the PET, mothers were asked to elicit and sustain a smile from infants as they added and then removed modalities of engagement (eye-contact/facial expression, voice and touch) across six 30-second “epochs.” Subsequent behavioral coding from video-recordings determined changes in infants’ state across the epochs of the PET. Preliminary analyses based on 103 of the 335 infants in the PET at 24 weeks revealed that infants displayed significantly increased alertness as mothers introduced new modalities of engagement in the PET, and a partial decline in alertness as modalities were removed (linear contrast F(1,102) = 24.37, P = 0.000; quadratic contrast F(1,102) = 7.27, P = 0.008). Although maternal thiamine dosage did not influence these patterns overall (F's < 1.56, P's > 0.20), higher maternal thiamine dosage was associated with infants displaying enhanced alertness when mothers first offered eye-contact in the PET (beta-weight = 0.026; t = 2.01, P = 0.047). This pattern of alerting to maternal eye-contact was statistically significant only in the 10 mg group (paired t(25) = 3.14, P = 0.004). Infants whose mothers received 10 mg daily thiamine supplementation displayed increased alertness to opportunities to interact socially. These preliminary findings (a) showcase the value of the PET for assessing infants’ responsiveness to caregiver's efforts to engage them socially, and (b) hint that maternal thiamine supplementation promotes infants’ social responsiveness, thereby underscoring the importance of infants’ early access to adequate thiamine for neuro-cognitive thriving. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation & New York Academy of Sciences.
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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".