Study Ties Weight Gain in First Month of Life to Higher IQ

A new study from the University of Adelaide reveals a close association between a child's IQ and the weight it gains in the first month of its life.

The study conducted by the public health researcher Dr Lisa Smithers discovered that those babies that put on 40 percent of their birthweight within the first four weeks had an IQ 1.5 times higher by the time they were six years old when compared to those infants that put on just 15 percent of their birthweight in the same period, reports the Herald Sun.

"Other pieces of the literature pointed to this kind of effect, but nobody's really also looked at that really early period, those first four weeks of life," lead author of the study Smithers was quoted inABC.Net. "This was additional to that other research which says growth in the first year [is important]; well, actually what we've shown is growth in those first four weeks is also very, very important."

For this study, the researcher examined the data of 14,000 children who were born full term.

Based on the data the researchers noticed that that those kids that had the biggest growth in head circumference also had the highest IQs. According to the researchers, head circumference is a sign of brain volume and newborns with greater increase in head circumference have a rapid brain growth.

The researchers warn that this study should not be a reason to overfeed kids so that they develop higher IQs because overfeeding can lead to drastic health effects such as obesity.

At the age of 6, those kids who had gained most weight after birth scored high on verbal IQ. They predict that this could be because neural structures for verbal IQ develop much early in life and a rapid weight gain in early infancy has a cognitive benefit.