Maternal nutritional status before and during pregnancy and child’s early neurocognitive development

Background:While many studies have examined the effect of sub-optimal nutrition early in life, at a critical stage of brain development, on later cognitive function in children, few studies have evaluated the effect of maternal nutritional status on child’s cognitive development. This study aims to assess the effect of maternal nutritional status before conception and during pregnancy on child’s early neurocognitive development.Methods:From 2014 to 2017, in Benin, women were followed from the pre-conception period to delivery (RECIPAL cohort). Then, a sub-sample of their newborns were followed up from birth to 3 months of age (SEPSIS cohort). Anthropometric data were recorded twice before pregnancy and monthly in pregnancy. Nutritional status was assessed before pregnancy by pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI) and in pregnancy by gestational weight gain (GWG). Child’s neurocognitive development was assessed at 3 months by 4 scales (receptive and expressive language, visual-perceptual skills and visual-motor skills) resumed by the Early Learning Composite (ELC) score of the Mullen Scales of Early Learning. We performed a multivariate linear regression to assess the effect of maternal pre-pregnancy BMI and GWG on child’s ELC score at 3 months of age.Results:A total of 158 mother-child pairs were included in the analysis. The prevalence of pre-pregnancy underweight (