Abstract
Introduction: Under nutrition profoundly affects children’s survival, growth and development. Variousclassifications of malnutrition in children use different cut off points for malnutrition making it difficultto compare data. The Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) is an alternative classificationsystem which incorporates stunting, wasting and underweight. Objective: To identify malnutrition inunderfive children in a low socio-economic urban area of Guntur city. Methods: This cross-sectional studywas carried out during 2017 and 2018 at Israilpet in Guntur city of Andhra Pradesh. Weights and heightswere measured for 740 underfive children (367 boys and 373 girls) according to WHO guidelines. The datacollected was entered into MS Office Excel and analysed data is presented in the form of tables. Importantfindings are subjected to statistical tests at 5% Level of Significance. Results: Using WHO standards, 4.1%boys and 1.9 % girls are lesser than 3 standard deviations from the median and therefore can be consideredseverely malnourished. 10.4 % boys and 8.8% girls were moderately malnourished. Only 1 girl was morethan +3 SDs and is obese. The infant age group has the highest prevalence of malnutrition (33.7%). Stuntingis overall 10.0 % while wasting is 39.6%. Anthropometric failure taking into consideration all three aspectsof malnutrition i.e. wasting, stunting and underweight is 53.9% (boys 54.2% and girls 53.7%) Discussion:The response to child under nutrition in India has been limited to food supplementation not taking intoconsideration the multidimensional nature of malnutrition. Stunting is a significant form of under-nutritionbut goes largely unrecognized. CIAF could recognize more undernourished children than the z score-basedclassification. Conclusion: Using low weight-for-age as the only criterion may underestimate the trueprevalence of under nutrition. It is also seen that under nutrition in the first year of life is significantly higherboth in boys and girls.
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