As we wade through the ocean of diagnoses LuLu has received, one thing keeps haunting me…how much of a role did her first 20-months in the institution have in “causing” all this.

Early on, I understood the potential psychological ramifications of her orphanage neglect and abuse in causing her PTSD and RAD. But as new diagnoses, such as PDD-NOS and Tourettes came in (and now pyroluria and PCOS), I began wondering how many problems she would be exhibiting if she had been born to us, or placed with us a birth.

As I dug deeper into the leaky gut syndrome research for yesterday’s blogs, one thing became apparent, malnutrition in infants changes their brains permanently. So, the fact that LuLu’s “special need” was rickets, a vitamin D deficiency-caused condition, due to malnutrition, is significant. When we adopted LuLu she weighed 19 pounds at 20 months of age. She was skinny, but did not, according to our pediatrician, have rickets. Although she had obviously never had solid food (because she didn’t know how to chew), she caught on quickly and gained weight and physical ability on almost a daily basis.

Exactly what effect malnutrition has in all of this isn’t known through research, yet. Mostly because it’s hard to isolate malnutrition from other factors that could negatively impact a child’s development, like neglect, unclean living conditions, exposure to environmental toxins, and poor health care. Regardless, though, it stands to reason that not getting enough nutrients into your system while your brain is developing (remember much of an infant’s brain develops during the first two years after birth), has got to have negative impact.

Research does show that malnutrition impacts your motivation and emotional regulation. Studies have shown that a malnourished brain will be less able to adapt to stressful situations than a healthy brain. While originally scientists believed that malnutrition caused permanent brain damage of an intellectual/cognitive nature, what is being found is that the damage is to the hippocampus and midbrain, and the ability to regulate emotions more so than cognitive and learning ability.

And the ability to regulate your emotions, to enable yourself to attend, to not get frustrated at failure, to switch gears and not have “stuck” thinking, to not become overly aggressive or angry…all of these traits are needed to successfully navigate just about any situation. But all are more difficult if your nutritional needs were not met as an infant.

After researching leaky gut, it’s easy to see how lack of the right type of nutrition can throw a person’s GI and immune system into a severe imbalance, and how all of this just adds layer upon layer of problems.

When I look at all this information, I see LuLu, and her layer upon layer of disabilities, each affecting the other and all caused by some unidentifiable mixture of genetics, environment, neglect and poor nutrition.

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