Iron pills improve kids' test scores … as does breakfasting near test time - Nutrition

Science News, Nov 2, 1996

Using dietary supplements to treat iron deficiency improves a girl's learning and memory, a new study finds. Teenage girls face a particular risk of iron deficiency. "A lot of iron is used up laying down new muscle and expanding the blood volume" to meet the needs of a growing body, explains pediatrician Ann B. Bruner of Johns Hopkins Children's Center in Baltimore. However, this is also the time that girls begin to menstruate. "And it's probably the addition of this [iron loss in] menstrual blood," she says, "that leaves many girls in a negative iron balance during much of puberty."

Working with four local schools-two public, two private-Bruner's team recruited 716 girls age 14 to 18 for blood tests. Of the 112 girls who were iron-deficient but not anemic, 81 entered the study. After giving each girl four tests of attention and memory, Bruner's group randomly assigned half of the teens to receive daily pills containing 260 milligrams of iron and the other half to get identical pills containing no iron. Eight weeks later, all of the girls took the battery of tests again.

"Adults and teenagers with iron deficiency frequently report they have trouble concentrating," Bruner notes. In this study, however, iron had no effect on scores from the three tests measuring attention. It made a difference only on the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test. Here, each girl listened to 12 words and then tried to recall them. The researchers administered the exercise three times, using the same list, and added the correctly recalled words from all three trials.

Both groups of girls scored the same on the initial group of tests. Eight weeks later, the iron-supplemented girls remembered an average of one word more on each of the second and third trials, she reports in the Oct. 12 Lancet. The girls who received the ironfree pills scored the same on both batteries of tests.

Bruner would prefer that teens-especially the 15 percent of girls with iron deficiency-eat an extra serving of perhaps spinach, raisins, or wheat germ three times a week. But as a mother, she's learned that children don't always cooperate, making vitamin and mineral supplements a useful fallback. Indeed, she finds that none of the teenage girls she treats eats breakfast. "They're too busy doing their hair," she says. Then they skip those "nasty" school lunches, snack on chips and sodas after school, and pick up dinner at the fast-food franchise where they work. "Unfortunately," she laments, "this is real."