Active Projects
INFANT NUTRITION & COGNITION STUDIES
Currently recruiting for either avocado (see below) or egg (scroll down) intervention
AVOCADO Study Purpose: The purpose of this research study is to determine if eating avocados during breastfeeding will increase nutrients important for brain development in the milk and subsequently, improve infant cognition.
What participants will do: You and your child will come to the lab for 3 sessions across 3 months. Mom will be asked to eat avocados daily (Hass avocados provided), keep a food diary, provide milk and saliva samples, and fill out questionnaires about her infant’s development. Four times during the study period, the study coordinator will deliver fresh avocados to your house and pick up a milk sample. Baby will play age-appropriate games, participate in a memory activity, and provide a saliva sample.
Recruiting: Healthy lactating women at 12-15 weeks postpartum (infant will be 3 months old at the first session)
Compensation: You will receive $75 at each visit as a token of our appreciation.
Contact us for a quick screening to see if you qualify! Call 704-250-5018, email feedingbrains@unc.edu, or click HERE to enter your contact information.
EGG Study Purpose: The purpose of this research study is to determine if eating eggs during breastfeeding will increase nutrients important for brain development in the milk and subsequently, improve infant cognition.
What participants will do: You and your child will come to the lab for three sessions across 3 months. Mom will be asked to eat eggs (organic egg powder provided), keep a food diary, provide blood, milk, and saliva samples, and fill out questionnaires about her infant’s development. Baby will play age-appropriate games, participate in a memory activity, and provide blood and saliva samples.
Recruiting: Healthy lactating women at 12-15 weeks postpartum (infant will be 3 months old at the first session)
Compensation: You will receive $75 at each visit as a token of our appreciation.
Contact us for a quick screening to see if you qualify! Call 704-250-5018, email feedingbrains@unc.edu, or click HERE to enter your contact information.
Completed Projects
Does a mother's diet during pregnancy affect how well her baby sleeps at six months of age?
We wanted to find out! Previous research has shown that the quality of babies’ sleep affects their cognitive abilities and behavior across a broad range of ages and outcomes (Bernier, Beauchamp, Bouvette-Turcot, Carlson, & Carrier, 2013; Bernier, Carlson, Bordeleau, & Carrier,2010; El-Sheikh, Kelly, Buckhalt, & Benjamin Hinnant, 2010; Mindell, Leichman, DuMond, & Sadeh, 2017; Plancoulaine et al., 2017).
What predicts the quality of an infant’s sleep? We hypothesized that higher amounts of fatty acids (specifically docosahexaenoic acid, DHA; arachidonic acid ARA; linolenic acid, LNA; and linoleic acid, LA) in maternal blood would predict higher quality sleep in infants at six months. Our participants were 33 African-American women between the ages of 20 and 42.
Each participant completed a blood draw during her third trimester of pregnancy and reported everything she ate on three different days to our team of researchers. After birth, we paid two home visits to each mom and baby, when the infant was three and six months of age. During the home visits, our team of researchers video-recorded mother-child interactions, and performed developmental assessments. Each mom also completed a demographic questionnaire. At the beginning of each home visit, infants were fitted with a small monitor around his or her ankle that measured their limb movements for the week following the appointment. Those data were used to help determine the quality of the infant’s sleep. In addition to these data, each mother reported her infant’s sleep patterns for those seven nights via phone calls with members of our research team.
Once all of the data were collected, we assayed the blood samples for levels of DHA, ARA, LNA, and LA, and contrasted those levels with the sleep patterns of each infant. What did we find? Infants whose mothers’ blood had higher levels of LNA and LA during their third trimester slept longer during the night, woke up fewer times, and had a greater amount of their total sleep time occurring at night, three important markers for quality sleep. Notably, DHA and ARA did not prove to have any effects on these infant’s sleep patterns.
So why does this matter? DHA has gotten a lot of attention in recent years for being an essential nutrient for brain development in infants. However, research on the effectiveness of taking DHA as a supplement has had mixed results, showing it is important to understand how other fatty acids play a complementary role in early life development. Considering how crucial sleep is to developmental outcomes it is imperative that we know more about the various factors affecting quality of sleep in infancy. This knowledge can then be used to help create interventions and recommendations that will improve sleep for all babies and lessen the disparities we see in infant development today. Thank you for our collaborators in this project at UNC-Chapel Hill, Marie Camerota, Cathi Propper, and Kristin Tully.
Bernier, A., Beauchamp, M. H., Bouvette-Turcot, A. A., Carlson, S. M., & Carrier, J. (2013). Sleep and cognition in preschool years: Specific links to executive functioning. Child Development, 84(5), 1542–1553. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12063
Bernier, A., Carlson, S. M., Bordeleau, S., & Carrier, J. (2010). Relations between physiological and cognitive regulatory systems: Infant sleep regulation and subsequent executive functioning. Child Development, 81(6), 1739–1752. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467- 8624.2010.01507.x
El-Sheikh, M., Kelly, R. J., Buckhalt, J. A., & Benjamin Hinnant, J. (2010). Children’s sleep and adjustment over time: The role of socioeconomic context. Child Development, 81(3), 870– 883. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01439.x
Mindell, J. A., Leichman, E. S., DuMond, C., & Sadeh, A. (2017). Sleep and Social-Emotional Development in Infants and Toddlers. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 46(2), 236–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2016.1188701
Plancoulaine, S., Stagnara, C., Flori, S., Bat-Pitault, F., Lin, J.-S., Patural, H., & Franco, P. (2017). Early features associated with the neurocognitive development at 36 months of age: the AuBE study. Sleep Medicine, 30, 222–228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2016.10.015
Memory Game Pilot Study for 12- and 24-month-olds
Completed
The purpose of this research study was to test some newly-designed toys which will be used in future studies to learn about brain development in children. We successfully recruited ten 12-month olds and ten 24-month olds who came to the lab for one session that lasted about an hour. During this time, we played a memory game with the child and asked parents fill out a few questionnaires about her child's language development and temperament. For the memory game, each child was asked to watch and imitate short action sequences that the researcher demonstrated. We assessed each child's ability to imitate and recall these sequences immediately and after a 10- or 20-minute delay.
With this pilot study, we wanted to determine the feasibility and durability of the toys when used with young children. We discovered that the children were interested and engaged with the toys, and found that some of the designs needed to be tweaked in order to withstand the banging or throwing that comes naturally to kids this age. We are in the process of analyzing the data to determine if the toys were successful at assessing short- and long-term memory in 12- and 24-month-olds.
Thank you to all the children and parents who participated in this pilot study. We appreciate each and every one of you!
Can eating blueberries prevent, slow down or even reverse memory loss?
Part 2: Enrollment completed, data analysis in progress
- In order to gain more information about the progression from Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) to dementia researchers in the Cheatham lab designed a study to follow up on our B.E.R.R.Y. participants. These participants will be coming back into the lab for one visit where they will participate in some of the same assessments they completed during Part 1 of the study. Electrophysiological techniques and the CANTAB have shown promise in the diagnosis and prediction of MCI. We will compare the new data to the data collected one, two, or three years ago. In June, we began bringing our BERRY participants back in to the lab for this exciting follow-up.
Can eating blueberries prevent, slow down or even reverse memory loss?
Part 1: Completed
- That is something that we are trying to figure out. Currently one in eight Americans age 65 and older suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, and there is no cure for this disease. In 2011, Dr. Cheatham and her post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Sheau Ching Chai, began a study to explore the effects of daily blueberry intake in older adults. In this study titled “Blueberries: Exciting Research Relevant to You (B.E.R.R.Y.)”, we enrolled 65-to 79-year-olds with mild cognitive decline.
Is the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio related to executive function in 7- to 12-year olds?
- We have a cool new task: the Electric Maze. Some of you had the chance to try out the maze in a recent study. I hope everyone had fun. We have now looked at the data. As it turns out, the Electric Maze Task (EMT) works very well as a measure of planning, which is exactly what we were trying to do. So, yay!
Do genetics affect human milk and babies' memory?
- Part 1 The results of the infant study are in! For those who don’t know, we have spent the last couple years working with moms and babies who were exclusively breastfeeding. The moms provided milk samples that we analyzed for fatty acid content. We also determined, from saliva, mom’s and baby’s genotype at a specific location on one of the genes responsible for using one fatty acid to make another – basically taking the fatty acids found in plants (e.g., ALA) and using them to make the fatty acids found in animals (e.g., DHA). People with a GG genotype are thought to not be able to complete this process. Thus, the hypothesis was that the few individuals who were GG would need to eat foods with plenty of DHA, whereas others could eat the plant foods and still have sufficient DHA. As a consequence, we thought that the baby of a GG mom may not be get-ting enough DHA and that we could maybe see this reflected in recognition memory abilities. So, the babies participated in an electrophysiology task in which they viewed a picture with which they were familiar mixed in with pictures that they were seeing for the first time.
Does the ratio between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids matter?
- First, a refresher: in the 7-9 year old study, we were looking at whether or not children’s diets affected their performance on a series of computer tests of memory, attention, and planning. We asked all the kids about their diet for three days, and then brought them in to play the computer games. I had a great time with that part! We were particularly looking for the types of fats that the kids consumed (like omega-3 or omega-6 fatty acids), and whether or not that mattered for how they did on the computer tasks. We found that kids who had a lower ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids were faster at completing the working memory tasks than kids with a higher ratio. We also found that kids who had a lower ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids were faster at completing planning tasks than kids with a higher ratio.