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Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study

BACKGROUND: Previous research has consistently found evidence of poor health outcomes among children living in conflict areas. However, the methodological focus of these studies has largely been on case studies, chart or registry reviews, qualitative studies, and single country studies. This reflect...

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Autores principales: Goli, Srinivas, Mavisakalyan, Astghik, Rammohan, Anu, Vu, Loan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9845514/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36217162
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13031-022-00483-9
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author Goli, Srinivas
Mavisakalyan, Astghik
Rammohan, Anu
Vu, Loan
author_facet Goli, Srinivas
Mavisakalyan, Astghik
Rammohan, Anu
Vu, Loan
author_sort Goli, Srinivas
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Previous research has consistently found evidence of poor health outcomes among children living in conflict areas. However, the methodological focus of these studies has largely been on case studies, chart or registry reviews, qualitative studies, and single country studies. This reflects the need for a comprehensive multi-country analysis of the associations between conflicts and child health over a longer period. This study analyses the adverse impact of exposure to different types of conflicts  from in utero to five years of age, on several child health measures across a large group of countries. Our analysis pools data from multiple countries and time-points, to provide robust evidence on the relationship between conflict and child health. METHODS: Geo-referenced data on various forms of conflict are combined with the Demographic Health Survey dataset, to construct a large unique database of 590,488 pre-school age children across 52 developing countries over the period 1997 to 2018. Our analysis exploits the within-country differences in children’s exposure to conflict from in utero to age five, to estimate its association with health outcomes. Our multivariate regression models estimate the links between conflict exposure and child health outcomes, measured using child nutrition outcomes (height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores) and immunization status. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Empirical estimates show that even after controlling for a large array of socio-economic and demographic characteristics and location fixed effects, conflict exposure is negatively associated with child nutrition and immunization, across all our measures of conflict. These findings are robust across a range of specifications, alternative measures of conflict and sub-samples. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13031-022-00483-9.
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spelling pubmed-98455142023-01-19 Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study Goli, Srinivas Mavisakalyan, Astghik Rammohan, Anu Vu, Loan Confl Health Research BACKGROUND: Previous research has consistently found evidence of poor health outcomes among children living in conflict areas. However, the methodological focus of these studies has largely been on case studies, chart or registry reviews, qualitative studies, and single country studies. This reflects the need for a comprehensive multi-country analysis of the associations between conflicts and child health over a longer period. This study analyses the adverse impact of exposure to different types of conflicts  from in utero to five years of age, on several child health measures across a large group of countries. Our analysis pools data from multiple countries and time-points, to provide robust evidence on the relationship between conflict and child health. METHODS: Geo-referenced data on various forms of conflict are combined with the Demographic Health Survey dataset, to construct a large unique database of 590,488 pre-school age children across 52 developing countries over the period 1997 to 2018. Our analysis exploits the within-country differences in children’s exposure to conflict from in utero to age five, to estimate its association with health outcomes. Our multivariate regression models estimate the links between conflict exposure and child health outcomes, measured using child nutrition outcomes (height-for-age and weight-for-age z-scores) and immunization status. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Empirical estimates show that even after controlling for a large array of socio-economic and demographic characteristics and location fixed effects, conflict exposure is negatively associated with child nutrition and immunization, across all our measures of conflict. These findings are robust across a range of specifications, alternative measures of conflict and sub-samples. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13031-022-00483-9. BioMed Central 2022-10-10 /pmc/articles/PMC9845514/ /pubmed/36217162 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13031-022-00483-9 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Goli, Srinivas
Mavisakalyan, Astghik
Rammohan, Anu
Vu, Loan
Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study
title Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study
title_full Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study
title_fullStr Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study
title_full_unstemmed Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study
title_short Exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study
title_sort exposure to conflict and child health outcomes: evidence from a large multi-country study
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9845514/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36217162
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13031-022-00483-9
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