ABSTRACT
Background: Undernutrition continues to be the primary cause of ill health and premature mortality. The sustainable development goal 2 aims to end all forms of hunger by 2030 and lead towards an improvement in child health. The national data categorize the level of undernutrition as underweight, wasting and stunting. The weight for age estimates used under ICDS misses out the other forms of malnutrition. This study was conducted to assess the prevalence of undernutrition using a composite index of anthropometric failure (CIAF) and compare it with conventional indices.Methods: A community based setting and cross-sectional study design. By simple random sampling 265 under-five children residing in a marginalized community of North West district of Delhi. Interviewer administered questionnaire was used to collect information and anthropometric measurements were taken using standard operative procedures. Z scores were calculated by WHO-ANTHRO software version 3.2.2. Descriptive analysis was conducted using statistical package for social sciences version 22.Results: The prevalence of anthropometric failure by CIAF was 60.5% and based on other indices undernutrition was found as 44.5% stunting, 35.4% underweight and 26.4% wasting. MUAC detected 23.7% of undernourished. CIAF provides a better picture of undernutrition compared to other indices.Conclusions: Since CIAF is more than that estimated by any of the conventional indicators, it proves to be a better indicator in assessing the overall burden of under-nutrition in a population. Development of policies based on CIAF to reduce the burden of undernutrition may prove to be more effective.
ABSTRACT
Global Nutrition Targets 2025 specified a set of six global nutrition targets, and one aim is to achieve a 40% reduction in the number of children under 5 years of age who are stunted. National data on underweight provided under National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4) (2015–2016) revealed an underweight prevalence rate around 35.7% as compared to NFHS-3 where it was 42.5%, which reflects only 6.8% reduction in underweight over a decade. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in the rural area of Rohtak district during October 2014 to September 2015 among children who were 1–5 years of age. The anthropometric measurement and nutritional status categorization among children were done using the WHO guidelines. Results: A total of 600 children participated in the study. Around 41.3% of the study participants had stunting as their nutritional status, while taking composite index of anthropometric failure (CIAF) for nutritional status into consideration, nearly 54.4% of the participants were undernourished. Stunting and underweight were more prevalent among girls. Conclusions: Composite anthropometric index provides the actual prevalence or proportion of undernourished children in a community, so the policies should be based on the basis of CIAF so to reduce the prevalence of undernutrition in the community more effectively.
ABSTRACT
A community-based cross-sectional study was conducted to find out the prevalence of composite index of anthropometric failure (CIAF) among 117 slum dwelling under-five children in Bankura town, West Bengal and its relation with some common socio-economic factors. Among study population, the prevalence of underweight was 41.6%, whereas CIAF was 80.3%. CIAF gave a near complete estimation of undernutrition unlike underweight. Children who were unimmunized, with more number of siblings, living in a nuclear family, or with illiterate mothers were more likely to be undernourished.
ABSTRACT
The three conventional anthropometric indicators of childhood undernutrition are stunting (low height-for-age), underweight (low weight-for-age) and wasting (low weight-for-height). Recently a new composite index, namely the Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) has been proposed and utilised to study childhood undernutrition. In this paper, we have attempted to construct three new indices of undernutrition, relative to the CIAF. These three indices are: Stunting Index (SI) = Stunting / CIAF, Underweight Index (UI) = Underweight / CIAF and Wasting Index (WI) = Wasting / CIAF. Furthermore, we have calculated and compared these indices using our dataset as well as other existing datasets. Using our dataset, the sex-combined values of SI, UI and WI were 0.364, 0.866 and 0.684, respectively. The corresponding values among boys were 0.364, 0.866 and 0.729. Among girls, they were 0.380, 0.866 and 0.641, respectively. When applied to the all India dataset, the values of SI, UI and WI were 0.756, 0.788 and 0.266, respectively. Similar values (SI = 0.723, UI = 0.681, WI = 0.294) were observed when they were computed on data available from Coimbatore, South India. In conclusion, we suggest that these three new indices provide additional information on the prevalence of different forms of undernutrition relative to the total level of undernutrition in a particular population.