To describe the food consumption, nutrition knowledge and nutritional assessment of childbearing age women and their children, living in rural villages in Madagascar. The results presented are related to the Tany Vao research study.

A cross-sectional pilot study.

The study was carried out in Ampanitosoha village on Nosy Mitsio island in Madagascar.

32 women (14–49 years) and 36 children and adolescents (2–17 years).

70 % of the women lacked nutrition knowledge and did not reach the Minimum Dietary Diversity Index for Women cut-off. The median BMI was 21·1 kg/m2 but 55·2 % of the women exceeded the cut-off for waist-to-hip ratio, 51·7 % for waist-to-height ratio and 81·2 % for mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC). Almost all had adequate intake of energy, protein and carbohydrates, while 27·6 % had excessive fat intake and 75·9 % of added sugars. Over half of the women did not meet the micronutrients Reference Daily Intake (RDI). For children, the MUAC z-score was lower for boys than for girls (P-value = 0·041).

These results underline the importance of increasing women’s nutritional knowledge to promote healthy pregnancy and lactation. Moreover, it is fundamental to provide people living in rural areas with sustainable tools to improve dietary diversity and support long-term health.

Despite a growing understanding of disorders of consciousness following severe brain injury, the association between long-term impairment of consciousness, spontaneous brain oscillations, and underlying subcortical damage, and the ability of such information to aid patient diagnosis, remains incomplete.

Cross-sectional observational sample of 116 patients with a disorder of consciousness secondary to brain injury, collected prospectively at a tertiary center between 2011 and 2013. Multimodal analyses relating clinical measures of impairment, electroencephalographic measures of spontaneous brain activity, and magnetic resonance imaging data of subcortical atrophy were conducted in 2018.

In the final analyzed sample of 61 patients, systematic associations were found between electroencephalographic power spectra and subcortical damage. Specifically, the ratio of beta-to-delta relative power was negatively associated with greater atrophy in regions of the bilateral thalamus and globus pallidus (both left > right) previously shown to be preferentially atrophied in chronic disorders of consciousness. Power spectrum total density was also negatively associated with widespread atrophy in regions of the left globus pallidus, right caudate, and in the brainstem. Furthermore, we showed that the combination of demographics, encephalographic, and imaging data in an analytic framework can be employed to aid behavioral diagnosis.

These results ground, for the first time, electroencephalographic presentation detected with routine clinical techniques in the underlying brain pathology of disorders of consciousness and demonstrate how multimodal combination of clinical, electroencephalographic, and imaging data can be employed in potentially mitigating the high rates of misdiagnosis typical of this patient cohort.