Nutritional health status: association of stunted and wasted children and their mothers

Abstract

Background: Across the globe, 149 and 49 million children are stunted and wasted, respectively. Prevalence of stunting and wasting is 40.2 and 17.7% in children of Pakistan. Stunting and wasting are accompanied with genetics, dietary factor, lack of information, bottle feeding, illiterate parents, less birth interval, infection such as diarrhoea, low birth weight, mother suffering from malnutrition during pregnancy, breastfeeding, pharmaceutical, and hormonal, psychosocial, and low social-economic status.

Methods: Stunted and wasted children and their mothers were called on and detail discussions related to research plan were carried out. Informed consent was assured from mothers, for participation in the study. The demographics, anthropometrics, vital signs observations, body composition, clinical signs and symptoms, dietary intake and associated biomarkers (CBC, level of urea nitrogen in blood, serum albumin globulin and serum creatinine.) were tools for nutritional health status assessment. SPSS software was implied on data.

Results: The study found that 27.2% mothers were belonged to stunted children, 17.3% belonged to wasted children, and 50.9% belonged to those children who were suffering from both stunting and wasting condition.57.9% mothers who were illiterate belong to stunted and wasted children. CBC and Hb test was prominent, stunted and wasted children had Hb 9.88 mg/dL, whereas, their mothers had 10.8 mg/dL as average Hb. The average height and weight of stunted and wasted children was 68.6 cm and 7.11 kg respectively. Dietary patterns and diet quality of both mothers and children were poor, due to lack of affordability; they were not able to eat healthy food.

Conclusion: Stunting and wasting ultimately resulted in poor growth and development of children. Most of children were anemic, they height and weight less than WHO growth standards. They had less knowledge and poor intake of food diet pattern so children growth was poor.

Keywords: Stunting; creatinine; dietary factors; genetics; wasting.