Does the 65 cm height cut-off as age proxy exclude children eligible for nutritional assessment in Bangladesh?
OBJECTIVE: During nutritional surveys and in circumstances when it is difficult to ascertain children's age, length/height cut-offs are used as proxy for age to sample children aged 6–59 months. In a context of prevalent stunting, using data from primary health care centres where age and height parameters were well-recorded, we assessed the proportion of children aged between 6 and 59 months who would be excluded from nutritional assessment using a height cut-off of 65 cm as a proxy for age ≥6 months.
DESIGN: This was a secondary data analysis of primary health centre data.
RESULTS: A total of 2060 children were included in the analysis, with a median age of 24 months and a median height of 78 cm (SD 12.1, range 50–109 cm). There were 240 (12%, 95%CI 10–13) children aged between 6 and 29 months, with a height <65 cm. The majority (59%) of these children were females; 97.5% were aged 6–17 months.
CONCLUSION: In an urban slum setting in Bangladesh, the use of the current height cut-off as a proxy for age excludes vulnerable children from nutritional assessment and could also lead to underestimation of the prevalence of malnutrition in nutritional surveys.
Keywords: age; height; malnutrition; nutrition survey; operational research
Document Type: Research Article
Affiliations: 1: Médecins Sans Frontières, Medical Department (Operational Research), Brussels Operational Centre–Luxembourg, Luxembourg 2: Centre for International Health, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway 3: International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, New Delhi, India 4: Médecins Sans Frontières, Keibera, Nairobi, Kenya 5: Médecins Sans Frontières, Operations Centre Brussels, Brussels, Belgium 6: Médecins Sans Frontières, Kamrangirchar, Dhaka, Bangladesh 7: International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, Paris, France
Publication date: 21 December 2012
Public Health Action (PHA), The Union's quarterly Open Access journal, welcomes the submission of articles on operational research. It publishes high-quality scientific research on health services, providing new knowledge on how to improve access, equity, quality and efficiency of health systems and services.
The Editors will consider any manuscript reporting original research on quality improvements, cost-benefit analysis, legislation, training and capacity building, with a focus on all relevant areas of public health (e.g. infection control, nutrition, TB, HIV, vaccines, smoking, COVID-19, microbial resistance, outbreaks etc).
- Editorial Board
- Information for Authors
- International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease
- Public Health Action
- Ingenta Connect is not responsible for the content or availability of external websites
Receive new issue alert- Access Key
- Free content
- Partial Free content
- New content
- Open access content
- Partial Open access content
- Subscribed content
- Partial Subscribed content
- Free trial content