"As a new school year approaches many parents are hoping for a breakthrough for their children Higher grades better behavior and fewer talks with exasperated teachers. Tutors counseling stern lectures and good oldfashioned wishful thinking are all possibilities. But some moms and dads also try to give their kids a nutritional edge in the classroom with the help of supplements. Many supplements promise to boost young brains with doses of docosahexaenoic acid or DHA an omega fatty acid thats naturally found in cell membranes throughout the body. DHA is particularly abundant in the nervous system and it seems to help brain cells communicate with one another. Commonly found in prenatal vitamins and infant formulas DHA is also showing up in products specifically aimed at gradeschool children. BrainStrong a product from Amerifit thats widely advertised on TV has a gummy formula for children ages  to . Each dose has  milligrams of DHA along with a full days supply of vitamins A C E and B. According to the instructions children should chew one gummy each day. Its sold at many drugstores and grocery stores with a price tag of about  for a bottle of  gummies.   BrainStrong gets its DHA from Martek Biosciences Corp. which harvests the fatty acid from algae. Martek Biosciences makes a supplement of its own called lifesDHA Kids Softgel. The label says its Great for Kids and has a picture of two young people jumping for joy to drive home the message. Each softgel contains  milligrams of DHA without any other added nutrients. The label specifies that the product is intended for children older than . The instructions say to take one softgel every day with a meal. You can buy a bottle of  softgels online for about . The claims The TV ad for BrainStrong  in which the narrator speculates that a young girl wrapping herself in toilet paper may become a fashion designer and a boy playing with his pudding may become a food critic  says that DHA is a nutrient essential for proper brain development. The ads tagline is BrainStrong Nourish their potential. The BrainStrong website doesnt make any specific claims that it will make kids any smarter but it does say that DHA is brain nutrition and that DHA ensures that the brain retina heart and other parts of the nervous system develop and function properly from infancy through adulthood. The website for lifesDHA simply says that its a supplement for brain eye and heart health. Cassie FranceKelly a spokeswoman for Martek Biosciences says DHA is as important for the brain as calcium is for the bones. The bottom line is that kids need it but they dont get enough of it in their diets she says. The bottom line Undoubtedly DHA is an important nutrient for the brain and other organs of the body says Usha Ramakrishnan an associate professor of global health at Emory University in Atlanta who specializes in childhood nutrition. From time to time she has purchased DHAenhanced milk for her own child who is now . Ramakrishnan says that although the evidence isnt exactly airtight there is reason to believe that DHA supplements could help some children perform better in the classroom especially if their minds have a tendency to wander. Children who get adequate DHA as infants and toddlers  a crucial period of brain development  seem to have more focus in later years she explains so its reasonable to suspect that supplements could help older kids too. Its not something that will make you smarter she says. But it may help you pay attention and get more out of school. Still Ramakrishnan says parents shouldnt expect any dramatic improvements. If it were a whopping effect there would be a lot more studies she says. One of the few clinical trials of DHA supplements in schoolage children included nearly  kids from Australia and Indonesia. The  study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that giving kids a supplement containing  mg of DHA every day for a year slightly improved verbal learning and memory scores but didnt seem to affect overall intelligence or the ability to pay attention.   A  study of  children ages  to  found that taking a supplement containing  mg of DHA every day for  weeks had almost no measurable effect on thinking skills or academic performance. As reported in the journal Research in Developmental Disabilities the children receiving the DHA actually had slightly worse reports from teachers than the children taking a placebo. Even with such uncertainty DHA supplements may be worth a try for schoolage kids says John Colombo a DHA researcher and director of the Schiefelbusch Institute for Lifespan Studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Colombo says his own children now  and  have been taking  mg DHA supplements Neuromins which also uses DHA from Martek for years. Its impossible to know if it made them better students Colombo says. But it almost certainly didnt hurt. Theres no downside to it he says."