Nutritional Intervention as Correlates of Cognitive Function in School Age Children in Somolu Local Government Area of Lagos State’- An Interventional Study

Nutritional  Intervention as Correlates of Cognitive Function in  School Age Children in Somolu Local Government  Area of Lagos State’is a nutritional interventional study using a 3-month school feeding program in 2 Public Primary Schools in Somolu ,a poor periurban area of Lagos State.Tested variables included school attendance,cognitive development (using Raven’s Coloured Progressive Matrices(CPM),a leading global non-verbal measure of intelligence and mental ability),mid-upper arm circumference(MUAC), weight,height and body mass index (BMI).Mean difference between pretest& posttest scores of control(CTR) and experiment(EXP) groups showed most significant changes in CPM scores(62.0/167.0),followed by mid upper arm circumference(2.5/25.1), and then weight(10.5/25.8),followed by BMI(7.3/16.5) and the least was height(1.6/6.9). School attendance records of the 1st 30 school days of intervention showed 83.3% of the EXP attended school everyday while 23.8% of the CTR attended school for 28 days.The study also showed that the children did quite poorly in weight-for-age scores (WAZ), height-for-age scores (HAZ) and BMI-for-age (BAZ) scores for school age children as prescribed by 2007 WHO Growth Reference for 5-19 year olds.At the beginning of the study,of the 100 participants,33.3%, 26.2% &33.3% were below the 15th percentile  and15.5%, 16.7% and 17.9% were below the 3rd percentile for Weight-for-Age (WAZ),Height-for-Age (HAZ) and BMI-for-Age (BAZ) respectively.This agreed with previous studies that reported 20% of Nigerian children had weight-for-height measurements under the 5th percentile of the US National Center for Health Statistics standard and another that placed prevalence of childhood malnutrition at 20.8%-30.81% using the National Centre for Health Statistics Reference values among Nigerian children. It was presented during the University of Lagos 2012 Golden Jubilee International Research Conference and Fair, was subsequently awarded Best Faculty Post-graduate research.