Abstract
Current methods for infant and child nutritional assessment rely on anthropometric measurements, whose implementation faces technical challenges in low- and middle-income countries. Anthropometry is also limited to linear measurements, ignoring important body shape information related to health. This work proposes the use of 2D geometric morphometric techniques applied to a sample of Senegalese participants aged 6–59 months with an optimal nutritional condition or with severe acute malnutrition to address morphometric variations due to nutritional status. Significant differences in shape and size body changes were described according to nutritional status, resulting age, sex and allometric effect crucial factors to establish nutritional morphological patterns. The constructed discriminant functions exhibited the best classification rates in the left arm. A landmark-based template registering body shape could be useful to both assess acute malnutrition and better understand the morphological patterns that nutritional status promotes in children during their first 5 years of growth and development.
Highlights
Nutrition is a crucial factor for optimum child growth and development, especially throughout the first 1000 days of life, and beyond
The aim of this study was, complementarily to the research line opened in a previous w ork[17], that is, to assess body shape changes that occur between 6 and 59 months of age associated with Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) by means of geometric morphometric techniques applied to images of the body in anterior view in order to evaluate this new methodology to asses undernutrition
World Health Organization (WHO) currently supports community-based care for children with uncomplicated SAM, which has enhanced health facilities to better invest their resources in handling SAM children with c omplications[7]
Summary
Nutrition is a crucial factor for optimum child growth and development, especially throughout the first 1000 days of life, and beyond. MUAC and WHZ have been shown to reliably predict outcome in severely malnourished children and are widely used to identify those at greater risk of death[8,9] These indicators are based on indirect measurements of body composition and their interpretation and validity have been c hallenged[10,11]. Anthropometric measurements in infants and children under 3 years old are less reliable, with respect to adults, as they are smaller and minor measuring differences may change significantly their nutritional a ssessment[12]. This circumstance adds to the difficulty of taking accurate and reliable measurements. The conception and development of new methods to study nutritional status in infancy and early childhood is relevant[17]
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