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Maternal undernutrition as proxy indicators of their offspring’s undernutrition: evidence from 2011 Ethiopia demographic and health survey
Authors: Alinoor Mohamed Farah, Bilal Shikur Endris, and Seifu Hagos Gebreyesus
Source: BMC Nutrition, 5(1): 1-12; DOI: 10.1186/s40795-019-0281-z
Topic(s): Body Mass Index (BMI)
Child health
Maternal health
Nutrition
Country: Africa
  Ethiopia
Published: MAR 2019
Abstract: Background The intergenerational continuity of undernutrition is influenced by shared genetic, household socio-economic and cultural resources which will be associated with the mother and the child nutritional status, possibly to the same degree. Provided that this assumption is valid, maternal height and BMI could be a simple way of measuring nutritional status of their children. Methods Data were obtained from the 2011 Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS 2011). An analytical sample of 8, 505 children whose mothers are not pregnant and live with their biological mothers was included. The bivariate associations between nutritional indices of the mother and the children were analyzed with Pearson correlation coefficients. The sensitivity, specificity, predictive values and area under Roc curves were calculated. Logistics regression for binary outcomes was also used to evaluate the predictors of child undernutrition. Results Children who experienced stunting, underweight or wasting had mothers with lower mean BMI than those who did not (p?
Web: https://bmcnutr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40795-019-0281-z