Relationship between health services, socioeconomic variables and inadequate weight gain among Brazilian children.

ABSTRACT

PIP: This article assesses the relationship between health services, socioeconomic variables, and inadequate weight gain among Brazilian children. The study used ecological analysis to assess the relative contributions of these variables to variations in the prevalence of inadequate weight gain among infants and young children in 140 municipalities in the State of Caera, northeast Brazil. The assessment of the total effect of selected variables involved fitting three unique sets of multivariate linear regression models to the prevalence of inadequate weight gain among infants and children. Findings showed several significant predictors of the prevalence of inadequate weight gains. These include participation in growth monitoring and a degree of urbanization, which together account for 38.3% of the variation, and female illiteracy rate (9.7% of the variation). Overall, these factors explain 25.6% of the variation in child growth. In conclusion, the study suggests that efforts to reduce the average municipality-specific female illiteracy rate, in combination with participation in growth monitoring may be effective in reducing municipality-level prevalence of inadequate weight gain among infants and children in Caera.