Nutritional screening for 2-5 years old children in urban and rural outpatient setting

Abstract

hildhood malnutrition is prevalent in low and middle income countries. It is an important indirect cause of child mortality in these countries. However, this problem remains largely unrecognized by health care workers. In Egypt, malnutrition remains a major problem despite massive efforts to provide nutritional support to deal with malnutrition in recent years. Urban children generally have better nutritional status than their rural counterparts. Therefore, the study of the prevalence of malnutrition and prevention of malnutrition should be given a high priority in the primary health care programs with particular attention paid to the rural population. Additionally, Conventional indicators like weight-for-age, height-for-age, and BMI indicate different facts of nutritional status. The most common indicator is Weight-for-age which can be used individually or in combination. These conventional indices fail to depict the overall magnitude of under-nutrition in the population. Screening tool for assessment of malnutrition in pediatric age group STAMP is an alternative classification system which attempts to fill this gap. Therefore, we conducted this study with the aim of assessing the nutritional status of children from 2 to 5 years in rural and urban areas through the screening tool to assess malnutrition and effect of nutritional intervention program.