DENYING children love and affection in the earliest months of life can have a lasting impact on their intellectual, emotional and physical development.

This is the finding of a groundbreaking study that was presented yesterday to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, meeting in St Louis.

The first systematic comparison of abandoned children raised in orphanages and foster homes in Romania reveals how severe deprivation at a critical young age continues to affect progress years later.

Early neglect appears to affect behaviour most. When children are taken into foster care after spending their first months in an institution, they remain highly prone to such problems as aggression and hyperactivity.

Measurements of brain activity show that it remains much lower than normal in children who have been institutionalised early in life, even at the ages of 3 and 4.

Children placed in orphanages for any length of time show stunted growth, low IQs and poor emotional development compared with those in normal families. These negative effects can be partially improved by placing them in foster care.

The findings offer evidence that the brain requires special nurture and attention at a very young age if it is to develop normally. Improved care as a child gets older will have benefits but these appear to be patchy, with some aspects of brain function “catching up” more easily than others.

Charles Zeneah, of Tulane University, New Orleans, said: “This shows that there is clearly plasticity and an ability to catch up, but in almost no domain have children in foster care reached the levels of never-institutionalised children, at least at 42 and 54 months.”

The insights come from the first study to compare two sets of abandoned children brought up in different circumstances. This has allowed scientists to assess development with more rigour than previously possible.

The study involved 136 children raised in orphanages in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, for between six and 30 months after birth. Sixty-nine children were then put into foster care and the remaining 67 left in institutions. Seventy-two children brought up with their natural families were followed as a control.

When the study was started five years ago, almost all abandoned children in Romania were brought up in institutions. The American scientists who started the project paid for the foster care, which has now been taken over by the Romanian Government.

None of the children in the orphanage group was denied the chance to be fostered, adopted or reunited with natural families if the opportunity arose and only 17 are in institutions today.

Placing children with foster families improved many — but not all — parts of their development. Foster care significantly lowered the risk of emotional disorders such as depression and anxiety but had no effect on behavioural and conduct disorders such as aggression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The IQ scores of all the children were “borderline retarded” when they were enrolled in the study but improved significantly in the children moved to foster care, Nathan Fox, of the University of Maryland, said. But brain activity remained much lower than usual in the foster children.

Foster care led to growth spurts. Dana Johnson, of the University of Minnesota, said: “You can predict you’re going to lose a month of growth for every three you spend in an orphanage: a three-year-old will be the size of a typical two-year-old. When they arrived in foster care, we saw tremendous catch-up growth.”

The findings had important implications for public policy, particularly in countries that still routinely placed children in orphanages, he said.

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