Throughout infancy, the brain undergoes rapid changes in structure and function that are sensitive to environmental influences, such as diet. Breastfed (BF) infants score higher on cognitive tests throughout infancy and into adolescence than formula fed (FF) infants, and these differences in neurocognitive development are reflected in higher concentrations of white and grey matter as measured by MRI. To further explore the effect diet has on cognitive development, electroencephalography (EEG) is used as a direct measure of neuronal activity and to assess specific frequency bands associated with cognitive processes. Task-free baseline EEGs were collected from infants fed with human milk (BF), dairy-based formula (MF), or soy-based formula (SF) at 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 months of age to explore differences in frequency bands in both sensor and source space. Significant global differences in sensor space were seen in beta and gamma bands between BF and SF groups at ages 2 and 6 months, and these differences were further observed through volumetric modeling in source space. We conclude that BF infants exhibit earlier brain maturation reflected in greater power spectral density in these frequency bands.

The optimization of infant neuronal development through nutrition is an increasingly studied area. While human milk consumption during infancy is thought to give a slight cognitive advantage throughout early childhood in comparison to commercial formula, the biological underpinnings of this process are less well-known and debated in the literature. This systematic review seeks to quantitatively analyze whether early diet affects infant neurodevelopment as measured by various neuroimaging modalities and techniques. Results presented suggest that human milk does have a slight positive impact on the structural development of the infant brain—and that this impact is larger in preterm infants. Other diets with distinct macronutrient compositions were also considered, although these had more conflicting results.

Electroencephalography (EEG) is used to directly measure neuronal activity and evaluate network dynamics with an excellent temporal resolution. These network dynamics in the form of EEG microstates - distinct yet transiently stable topographies captured at peaks of the global field power - are increasingly used as markers of disease, neurodegeneration, and neurodevelopment. However, few studies have evaluated EEG microstates throughout the first year of life, and currently none have examined the potential effects of infant diet. The current study seeks to investigate whether different diets impact EEG microstates throughout the first year of life. EEGs were collected from approximately 500 healthy infants who were fed a human milk, diary-, or soy-based formula at three, six, nine, and twelve months of age. Microstate classes and temporal characteristics were then calculated for each timepoint and diet. Microstates classes showed a clear developmental trajectory, with duration decreasing with age, and coverage, globally explained variance, and occurrence generally increasing with age. There were relatively few significant differences between infants fed different diets, indicating that diet potentially effects functional neurodevelopment more subtly than previously indicated in the literature. This study adds to the growing body of literature demonstrating that formula feeding does not have clear disadvantages in terms of infant functional neuronal development.

Neural development begins in gestation and rapidly accelerates throughout early life. The environmental effect of infant diet is a subject of increasing study as it is the basic nutritive sources which support biological processes essential for healthy development. Previous research in our group has found small but significant effects of nutrition on early cognitive developmental tests between children primarily fed human milk (BF), soy‐based formula (SF), and dairy‐based formula (MF) for the first 12 months of life. This investigation uses this same data set: a study throughout infancy from 2 to 12 months of life. This study seeks to compare brain maturation using EEG aperiodic exponent between infants who received breast milk feeding and those who received a dairy‐based or soy formula. High‐density electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were taken at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 12 months of age using a 5‐min silent video baseline. Using Specparam (formerly fitting oscillations and one‐over‐F or “FOOOF”), aperiodic activity was computed through a power spectral density (PSD) analysis for each session, which were then averaged per dietary group over left, right, and medial frontal and parietal regions of interest (ROIs) and one occipital ROI. Aperiodic exponent is a potential marker of neuromaturation, as it is hypothesized to relate to excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance and structural development in GABAergic systems. We used generalized estimating equations in order to evaluate differences in aperiodic exponent across dietary grouping as well as across age. Consistent with some previous findings, aperiodic exponent was found to decrease with age; however, no significant associations were found with infant diet except at 3 months of age in which BF infants had a larger aperiodic exponent than formula fed (FF) infants.

In recent years, several automated processing pipelines have become available for pediatric EEG studies, increasing the ease-of-use, replicability, and robustness of available datasets. Here, we compared EEG outcomes derived from two widely used preprocessing pipelines, MADE and HAPPE, across three tasks (visually evoked potential (VEP), auditory oddball, and face processing), as well as resting state, in 81 infants (50.6% female; MeanAge = 5.51 months; RangeAge= 2.8-7.8 months) from the HBCD data release 1.0. Broad parameters such as filter cut-offs, automatic noise reduction, channel interpolation, and re-referencing were kept consistent between pipelines while core characteristics of HAPPE and MADE (e.g. HAPPE’s wavelets and MADE’s ICA with adjusted-Adjust to reduce noise) were retained. ERP mean amplitudes for common developmental components (VEP: N1-P1-N2; auditory oddball: MMR; Face: Nc, N290, P1, P400) were calculated, and no significant differences emerged across pipelines for any tasks. Best-practice metrics for data quality such as reliability, effect size, and SME were evaluated, and only one difference emerged. MADE had a significantly higher value (Δ = 0.13, d = 0.37, p = 0.003) for the SME of the deviant condition at the frontal-lateral cluster in the auditory oddball task. For absolute power during resting state, participants preprocessed through MADE had higher power in the gamma band (Δ = 0.12 µV2, d = 1.19, p < 0.001) than when processed with HAPPE. These findings show that MADE and HAPPE produce convergent, reproducible outcomes across the study's core paradigms, providing empirical guidance for pipeline selection in infant EEG research.

Neural development begins in gestation and continues throughout early life. The environmental effect of infant diet is a subject of increasing study as it is the caloric fuel which supports all developmental processes. Previous research in our group has found small but significant effects of nutrition on early cognitive developmental tests between children primarily fed human milk (BF), soy-based formula (SF), and dairy-based formula (MF) for the first 12 months of life. This investigation uses this same dataset: a study throughout infancy from 2 to 12 months of life. High-density electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings were taken at 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 12 months of age using a five-minute silent video baseline. Using Specparam (formerly fitting oscillations and one-over-F or “FOOOF”), aperiodic activity was computed through a power spectral density (PSD) analysis for each session, which were then averaged per dietary group over left, right, and medial frontal and parietal regions of interest (ROIs) and one occipital ROI. Aperiodic activity is a potential marker of neuromaturation, as it is hypothesized to relate to excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance and structural development in GABAergic systems. Consistent with previous findings, the aperiodic exponent steadily decreased for the first five months before stabilizing. We found that this effect was largely independent of early infant diet.