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Growth Improvements in Children above 3 Years of Age: The Cali Study^1,2,

Department of Pediatrics and Program in International Nutrition, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616

The Cali Study involved the random assignment of 301 malnourished children to be exposed to one (CT1, n = 113), two (CT2, n = 64), three (CT3, n = 62) or four (CT4, n = 62) 9-mo periods of a multifocal day care-based intervention (i.e., education, health and nutrition). The ages at which the intervention was initiated for Groups CT4, CT3, CT2 and CT1 were 3.5, 4.2, 5.2 and 6.1 y, respectively. After the experimental phase, children were followed up in elementary school until they were 10.4 y old. Our secondary data analyses show that children who were exposed at an earlier age and for a longer period of time showed the highest degree (P 0.05) of improvement in weight and linear growth during the pre-school period. These improvements in physical growth could no longer be detected 3 y after the termination of the intervention.

KEY WORDS: • malnutrition • growth • humans • nutrition supplementation • physical growth

¹ The financial support received from UNICEF for data analyses is gratefully acknowledged.

² The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked "advertisement" in accordance with 18 USC section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.

³ Current address: Department of Nutrition, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-4017.

⁴ To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Manuscript received 16 November 1993. Revision accepted 29 September 1994.