Nutritional status of Indian adolescents (15-19 years) from National Family Health Surveys 3 and 4: Revised estimates using WHO 2007 Growth reference

BACKGROUND: The National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) in India apply adult cutoffs of nutritional status for the estimation of undernutrition/overweight in the 15–19 age group. The prevalence of thinness in boys and girls thus estimated is 58.1% and 46.8% in NFHS-3, and 45% and 42% in NFHS-4 respectively. But the WHO recommends using age and sex-specific reference for adolescents. We reanalyzed the nutritional status of the adolescents using the WHO 2007 Growth Reference to obtain revised estimates of thinness, overweight and stunting across states, rural-urban residence, and wealth quintiles. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Demographic information, anthropometric data, and wealth index were accessed from the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) database. We re-analyzed the anthropometric data using WHO AnthroPlus software which uses the WHO 2007 Growth reference. The revised estimates of thinness assessed by BMI-for-age z-scores in boys and girls was 22.3% (95%CI: 21.6, 23.0) and 9.9% (95%CI: 9.5, 10.3) in NFHS-3 and 16.5% (95%CI: 16.0,17.0) and 9% (95%CI: 8.9, 9.2) in NFHS-4 respectively. Stunting was found to be 32.2% (95% CI: 31.6, 32.9) in boys and 34.4% (95% CI: 34.2, 34.7) in girls in NFHS-4. This was higher than that in NFHS-3; 25.2% (95% CI: 24.4, 26) in boys and 31.2 (95% CI: 30.6, 31.8) in girls. There was a clear socioeconomic gradient as there were higher thinness and stunting in rural areas. There was wide variation among the states with pockets of a double burden of malnutrition. CONCLUSION: Using the adult cutoffs significantly overestimates thinness in adolescents in the age group of 15–19 years old in India. Stunting, which is an indicator of long term nutrition is also widely prevalent in them. Future editions of DHS and NFHS should consider adolescents as a separate age group for nutritional assessment for a better understanding of nutritional transition in the population.