STUDYING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MALNUTRITION AND COGNITIVE PERFORMANCE FOR SCHOOL-AGE CHILDREN IN THE RURAL AREAS OF MOROCCO'S GHARB PLAIN

Summary Detecting and managing neurocognitive disorders in children early and promoting effective rehabilitation allows them to develop their neurocognitive abilities in a normal manner. This study aims to identify such neurocognitive issues in students attending public schools and living in the rural area of Morocco’s Gharb plain. This study therefore evaluates the short-term memory and visual attention performance for a group of public school students. The psychometric tests include applying the digit span test in forward and backward order and the bells test for test on a sample of 235 students aged between 10 years 2 months and 14 years. The average age of the students was 11.99±0.95. According to the results of these tests, 63.4% and 16.6% of the students succeeded in the forward and backward digit span tests, respectively. The study also found a significant correlation between the students’ nutritional status and their performance in digit memorization, suggesting that malnutrition negatively impacts working memory performance, because only 37.1% gave correct answers with forward order of memorization and 14.3% when the order was reversed. When evaluating visual attention, the average score was 29 bells out of 35, with 37.8% of students having attention difficulties. Nevertheless, the children’s performance did not significantly differ based on their nutritional status.