Examining the Influence of Maternal Thiamine Supplementation on Breastfed Cambodian Infant's Perceptual and Cognitive Functioning

Thiamine deficiency affects millions of infants within South and Southeast Asia due to a cultural reliance on polished white rice, which is lacking in thiamine. Specifically, Cambodian infants between the ages of 0-6 months are at increased risk of suffering consequences of thiamine deficiency, such as impaired cognitive development and potentially fatal infantile beriberi (Whitfield et al., 2019). As a part of a larger, randomized controlled trial, my thesis investigated the extent to which maternal thiamine supplementation may protect infant’s memory and perceptual abilities, as measured via the Visual Paired Comparison task (VPC). 335 lactating mothers were randomly assigned to four treatment groups (0mg, 1.2mg, 2.4mg, and 10mg daily thiamine supplement) when their infants were between 2- and 24-weeks postnatal. The VPC task was administered at 24- and 52-weeks postnatal; the task measures infants’ ability to encode an image, such as a new face or geometric pattern, and then, during test trials, recognize the image and discriminate the now-familiar image from a novel image. Previous research documents that infants who readily succeed at these perceptual/cognitive skills tend to look longer at the novel than the familiar image during test trials (Rose et al, 2008). We hypothesized that higher levels of maternal thiamine supplementation would be associated with higher novelty scores in infants’ VPC looking times. We found that maternal thiamine supplementation indeed influenced infants’ overall novelty scores; specifically, infants whose mothers received supplemental thiamine displayed higher average novelty scores than those whose mothers received a placebo. Above all, this research indicates that maternal thiamine supplementation benefits breastfed Cambodian infants’ neurocognitive development