(17-10-09) Healthy Toddlers of High DHA Mothers Have More Mature Attention Skills

Many studies have reported a positive relationship between maternal
concentrations of long-chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 LC-PUFAs) at delivery and desirable developmental outcomes in the offspring. Examples include cognitive performance, visual acuity, earlier achievement of some developmental milestones and motor quality scores, to name a few.

One of the challenges in assessing developmental outcomes in infants is the selection of the appropriate evaluation measurement for the age of the child.
Developmental changes usually have their own time course, so that assessments at different times will reflect different aspects of development or could be out of the target age. Attention is one characteristic that changes during
infancy and early childhood and this is thought to reflect developmental and neurological changes. Measurements of attention or look duration in infants are believed to peak at 26 weeks of age and decline thereafter. These assessments are influenced by the type of stimuli used, with attention to faces increasing after 26 weeks of age. Shorter look duration is regarded as more mature,
reflecting greater efficiency in processing information.

Endogenous attention, which refers to internally driven influences on
attention, may appear in the first 6 months of life. However, a higher level of this ability usually appears late in the first year. This type of attention is often studied in the context of free-play using behavioral measures, such as attention span, distractibility and perseverance. It is thought that these characteristics correspond to the maturation of areas in the frontal cortex, which proceeds at a slower rate than other brain structures.

As children develop, their ability to maintain attention and resist
distractions increases. Some investigators have reported that there is a
stability of distractibility between infancy and toddlerhood and that infants of mothers with high DHA at birth exhibited greater object exploration and less distractibility in the second year of life. Other studies, including some by these investigators, have reported that infants exposed to higher DHA during
gestation and infancy have better problem-solving skills, longer attention spans and less distractibility. The present report builds on an earlier study of attention in infancy and early childhood by focusing on endogenous attention during toddlers? free play with multiple objects.

Investigators at Loyola University, Chicago, and the University of Kansas assessed the relationship between maternal docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) concentrations at birth and the quality of attention in toddlers aged 12 and 18
months. Pregnant women were enrolled in a study of DHA supplementation in the last trimester in which DHA was provided by high- (135 mg DHA) or low-DHA (35 mg DHA) eggs. Maternal red blood cell DHA concentrations did not differ between
groups at delivery, largely because the variability in maternal DHA at baseline was substantial. Of the 70 toddlers invited to participate in this part of the study, 45 remained at 12 and 18 months of age. When they were divided into low and high maternal DHA groups according to the median DHA level in the maternal
red blood cells, the difference in mean DHA levels by analysis of variance was statistically significant, 4.7 versus 6.2 g DHA/100 g fatty acid.

To assess attention, the investigators presented the infants with an object and distracting stimuli to compete for the child?s attention. The target stimuli for each age were six small toys that could be manipulated or explored (see illustration of toy for 12 months of age). Different toys were presented at each age. With the child seated on a parent?s lap, an experimenter presented
the toys one at a time and demonstrated its function. The children were
encouraged to play and explore the toys for 5 minutes, with sessions timed by stopwatch. The children?s play sessions were recorded by video for coding the following measures: total duration of looking, number of episodes of inattention, average length of looks to the toys and total number of looks to the toys (shifts in attention).

As expected from the literature, the total looking time and average look time increased between 12 and 18 months of age in both high and low DHA groups, while the total number of looks and inattention episodes decreased (Table).
Toddlers of high DHA mothers had significantly more total looking time and fewer episodes of inattention compared with toddlers of low DHA mothers (P <0.01). In the 12-month-old toddlers, there were no differences between the groups in the number of looks to the toys or the average time spent looking.

By 18 months, the toddlers were more attentive, spent more time looking, had longer average looking times, fewer shifts in attention and fewer episodes of inattention compared with the observations at 12 months of age. Differences between the high and low DHA groups were significant. These results were interpreted as evidence of developmental change in free-play attention and
enhanced attentional functioning associated with higher maternal DHA status.
They are consistent with previously reported observations on attention and exposure to DHA and suggest that higher levels of DHA are related to more sophisticated attention skills and better problem-solving abilities.

The investigators raised an interesting question related to the effect of
higher DHA status on visual acuity and cognitive function. Although the
findings in term infants are inconsistent, could the observations on attention be related to or dependent upon enhanced visual acuity? This question cannot be answered by these results, but warrants investigation. This study further documents the developmental changes in attention between 12 and 18 months of
age and provides evidence that these changes are favored higher maternal DHA status at delivery.


Source: pufanewsletter

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