Temporal trend in the prevalence of malnutrition in children under five assisted by the Brazilian Income Transfer Program (2008-2019)

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the temporal trend of malnutrition in children aged under five years assisted by the Brazilian Income Transfer Program from 2008 to 2019, by exploring regional inequalities and seeking to determine the impact of the economic and political crises aggravated in 2014, and the government's adherence to fiscal austerity policies on the trend. The analyses were performed using aggregated data from infants (0-23 months) and preschoolers (24-59 months), extracted from the Brazilian Food and Nutritional Surveillance System (SISVAN) assisted by the Brazilian Income Transfer Program (n = 34,272,024). Trends were analyzed using generalized linear models with age-specific mixed effects (negative binomial distribution and log linkage function). The regional inequalities were analyzed based on the grouping of Federative Units according to the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) and the influence of crises and austerity policies on the prevalence of malnutrition by the interaction between "year" and "crisis" (2008-2013 vs. 2014-2019). There was a reduction in the prevalence of child malnutrition until mid-2013, when the trends became stationary for preschoolers and upward for infants. There was also a higher risk of malnutrition in Federative Units with medium- and high-social vulnerability, when compared to those with low-social vulnerability. The inflection points in the trends corroborate the hypothesis that the political and economic crises, and the governmental responses to these crises, negatively impacted the nutritional status of children in poverty and extreme poverty in Brazil.