Proportional Odds of Nutritional Status of Under-Five Children in Nigeria Indexed by MUAC

Anthony Ekpo¹ and Waheed Babatunde Yahya²

1. Department of Mathematics/Statistics/Computer Science, University of Agriculture, PMB 2373, Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria.
2. Department of Statistics, University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Kwara State, Nigeria.

Abstract: This paper present results regarding the impacts of some anthropometric, epidemiological and demographic factors on the nutritional status of under-five children which were categorized into three ordinal groups of Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM), Moderate Acute Malnutrition (MAM) and Global Acute Malnutrition (GAM) in Kazaure Local Government Area of Nigeria. An ordinal logit model that depicted the log-odds in favour of GAM (normal) child was fitted to the data based on a surveillance indexed by Mid-Upper Arm Circumference (MUAC). By this, the proportional odds of being in either of the nutritional status based on age, sex and measles when malnutrition surveillance is indexed by MUAC were determined. The results showed that, the proportional odd of measuring malnutrition prevalence using the MUAC index is (OR = 1.138, with p < 0.001). The sex of a child does not play a major role in determining the nutritional status of a child. Being vaccinated for Measles did not play a major role in classifying a child’s malnutrition status. Rather, variables that has to do with access to potable water, access to household food for children and other socioeconomic variable could be considered. Edema as a morbid state was found to be redundant in the study.

Keywords: Statistical surveillance, severe acute malnutrition, anthropometrics, bilateral edema.

Pages: 45 – 51 | Full PDF Paper