New Delhi: Babies born to anaemic mothers during pregnancy may have four per cent smaller total brain volumes and up to six per cent smaller key brain regions by age two, a new study has found.
Researchers from King’s College London and the University of Cape Town used a portable MRI scanner and found measurable differences in brain volume from around 12 months of age.
The findings, published in the journal Brain Communications, offer some of the earliest evidence that maternal anaemia shapes infant brain development in the first year of life and beyond, they said.
“What is striking about these findings is how early we are able to detect them. Seeing such prominent volumetric differences in infants exposed to anaemia in the womb reinforces the importance of optimising interventions for women both before and during pregnancy,” first author Jessica Ringshaw, researcher at King’s College London and the University of Cape Town, said.
The study followed 394 mother-infant pairs in Cape Town, with a subgroup of infants undergoing brain scans between three months and two years of age.
Differences were also found in three specific regions: the putamen, the caudate nucleus, and the corpus callosum – structures involved in movement, learning, emotion regulation, executive functioning, and communication between the two halves of the brain.
“Infants born to anaemic mothers had 3.77 per cent smaller intracranial volume and 3.32 per cent smaller putamen volumes across the first two years of life,” the authors wrote.
Over the first two years of life, the gap was found to widen.
The corpus callosum was around four per cent smaller in the anaemia-exposed group by 12 months, but by 24 months, that gap had grown to six per cent, the researchers found.
Further, the observed differences in volumes of brain regions were still evident despite most of the mothers in the study only having mild anaemia, they said.
The team added that the findings identify antenatal maternal anaemia as a strong risk factor for an altered child brain structure and highlight the importance of preventing and treating anaemia before and during pregnancy.
“In settings with multiple overlapping risk factors such as malnutrition and infectious disease, it is important to think about how they may be working together to drive anaemia and, in turn, impacting brain development,” Ringshaw said.
“By tailoring interventions to the local context, we can make a meaningful contribution to society by giving children the best chance of reaching their full developmental potential — not only surviving, but thriving,” the first author said. PTI
