Interconnected pathways link faecal microbiota plasma lipids and brain activity to childhood malnutrition related cognition.

Malnutrition affects over 30 million children annually and has profound immediate and enduring repercussions. Survivors often suffer lasting neurocognitive consequences that impact academic performance and socioeconomic outcomes. Mechanistic understanding of the emergence of these consequences is poorly understood.

Trajectories and social determinants of child cognitive development: a prospective cohort study from infancy through middle childhood in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Background: Over a third of children globally do not meet their developmental potential, and children living in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) are most vulnerable. Understanding the contextual factors that influence cognitive development for children in LMICs is crucial to inform and develop interventions. We sought to characterize developmental trajectories of cognition in Bangladeshi children and identify salient social determinants.

Exploration of auditory statistical learning, socioeconomic status, and language outcomes in Bangladeshi children: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.

Auditory statistical learning, or the ability to detect statistical regularities in continuously presented stimuli, is thought to be one element that underlies language acquisition. Prior studies have uncovered behavioral and neural correlates of statistical learning, yet additional work is needed from low- and middle-income countries to explore whether statistical learning varies across cultures or underlies associations often found between socioeconomic status (SES) and language outcomes. In the present study, we explored the feasibility of using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore auditory statistical learning in Bangladesh, a lower-middle-income country.

UNITY: A low-field magnetic resonance neuroimaging initiative to characterize neurodevelopment in low and middle-income settings.

Measures of physical growth, such as weight and height have long been the predominant outcomes for monitoring child health and evaluating interventional outcomes in public health studies, including those that may impact neurodevelopment. While physical growth generally reflects overall health and nutritional status, it lacks sensitivity and specificity to brain growth and developing cognitive skills and abilities. Psychometric tools, e.