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Prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Bagamoyo District Hospital, Tanzania

BACKGROUND: Malnutrition has long been associated with poverty, poor diet and inadequate access to health care, and it remains a key global health issue that both stems from and contributes to ill-health, with 50 % of childhood deaths due to underlying undernutrition. The purpose of this study was t...

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Autores principales: Juma, Omar Ali, Enumah, Zachary Obinna, Wheatley, Hannah, Rafiq, Mohamed Yunus, Shekalaghe, Seif, Ali, Ali, Mgonia, Shishira, Abdulla, Salim
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5070185/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27756276
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-016-3751-0
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author Juma, Omar Ali
Enumah, Zachary Obinna
Wheatley, Hannah
Rafiq, Mohamed Yunus
Shekalaghe, Seif
Ali, Ali
Mgonia, Shishira
Abdulla, Salim
author_facet Juma, Omar Ali
Enumah, Zachary Obinna
Wheatley, Hannah
Rafiq, Mohamed Yunus
Shekalaghe, Seif
Ali, Ali
Mgonia, Shishira
Abdulla, Salim
author_sort Juma, Omar Ali
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Malnutrition has long been associated with poverty, poor diet and inadequate access to health care, and it remains a key global health issue that both stems from and contributes to ill-health, with 50 % of childhood deaths due to underlying undernutrition. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of malnutrition among children under-five seen at Bagamoyo District Hospital (BDH) and three rural health facilities ranging between 25 and 55 km from Bagamoyo: Kiwangwa, Fukayosi, and Yombo. METHODS: A total of 63,237 children under-five presenting to Bagamoyo District Hospital and the three rural health facilities participated in the study. Anthropometric measures of age, height/length and weight and measurements of mid-upper arm circumference were obtained and compared with reference anthropometric indices to assess nutritional status for patients presenting to the hospital and health facilities. RESULTS: Overall proportion of stunting, underweight and wasting was 8.37, 5.74 and 1.41 % respectively. Boys were significantly more stunted, under weight and wasted than girls (p-value < 0.05). Children aged 24–59 months were more underweight than 6–23 months (p-value = <0.0001). But, there was no statistical significance difference between the age groups for stunting and wasting. Children from rural areas experienced increased rates of stunting, underweight and wasting than children in urban areas (p-value < 0.05). The results of this study concur with other studies that malnutrition remains a problem within Tanzania; however our data suggests that the population presenting to BDH and rural health facilities presented with decreased rates of malnutrition compared to the general population. CONCLUSIONS: Hospital and facility attending populations of under-five children in and around Bagamoyo suffer moderately high rates of malnutrition. Current nutrition programs focus on education for at risk children and referral to regional hospitals for malnourished children. Even though the general population has even greater malnutrition than the population presenting at the hospital, in areas of high malnutrition, hospital-based interventions should also be considered as centralized locations for reaching thousands of malnourished children under-five.
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spelling pubmed-50701852016-10-24 Prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Bagamoyo District Hospital, Tanzania Juma, Omar Ali Enumah, Zachary Obinna Wheatley, Hannah Rafiq, Mohamed Yunus Shekalaghe, Seif Ali, Ali Mgonia, Shishira Abdulla, Salim BMC Public Health Research Article BACKGROUND: Malnutrition has long been associated with poverty, poor diet and inadequate access to health care, and it remains a key global health issue that both stems from and contributes to ill-health, with 50 % of childhood deaths due to underlying undernutrition. The purpose of this study was to determine the prevalence of malnutrition among children under-five seen at Bagamoyo District Hospital (BDH) and three rural health facilities ranging between 25 and 55 km from Bagamoyo: Kiwangwa, Fukayosi, and Yombo. METHODS: A total of 63,237 children under-five presenting to Bagamoyo District Hospital and the three rural health facilities participated in the study. Anthropometric measures of age, height/length and weight and measurements of mid-upper arm circumference were obtained and compared with reference anthropometric indices to assess nutritional status for patients presenting to the hospital and health facilities. RESULTS: Overall proportion of stunting, underweight and wasting was 8.37, 5.74 and 1.41 % respectively. Boys were significantly more stunted, under weight and wasted than girls (p-value < 0.05). Children aged 24–59 months were more underweight than 6–23 months (p-value = <0.0001). But, there was no statistical significance difference between the age groups for stunting and wasting. Children from rural areas experienced increased rates of stunting, underweight and wasting than children in urban areas (p-value < 0.05). The results of this study concur with other studies that malnutrition remains a problem within Tanzania; however our data suggests that the population presenting to BDH and rural health facilities presented with decreased rates of malnutrition compared to the general population. CONCLUSIONS: Hospital and facility attending populations of under-five children in and around Bagamoyo suffer moderately high rates of malnutrition. Current nutrition programs focus on education for at risk children and referral to regional hospitals for malnourished children. Even though the general population has even greater malnutrition than the population presenting at the hospital, in areas of high malnutrition, hospital-based interventions should also be considered as centralized locations for reaching thousands of malnourished children under-five. BioMed Central 2016-10-19 /pmc/articles/PMC5070185/ /pubmed/27756276 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-016-3751-0 Text en © The Author(s). 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Juma, Omar Ali
Enumah, Zachary Obinna
Wheatley, Hannah
Rafiq, Mohamed Yunus
Shekalaghe, Seif
Ali, Ali
Mgonia, Shishira
Abdulla, Salim
Prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Bagamoyo District Hospital, Tanzania
title Prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Bagamoyo District Hospital, Tanzania
title_full Prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Bagamoyo District Hospital, Tanzania
title_fullStr Prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Bagamoyo District Hospital, Tanzania
title_full_unstemmed Prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Bagamoyo District Hospital, Tanzania
title_short Prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the Reproductive and Child Health clinic at Bagamoyo District Hospital, Tanzania
title_sort prevalence and assessment of malnutrition among children attending the reproductive and child health clinic at bagamoyo district hospital, tanzania
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5070185/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27756276
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-016-3751-0
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