Nutritional Status Of Socio-Economically Disadvantaged Preschool Children In India: A Review

Abstract

Undernutrition is a major public health problem leading to child morbidity and an underlying cause for more than half of child deaths worldwide, particularly in low socio-economic communities and in developing countries. Poverty is a key determinant of under nutrition, through the unhealthy physical environment, domestic stress.India is a big country having varied geography, climatic conditions, socioeconomic distribution, religion, culture, and food habits. Thus, the prevalence of undernutrition differs substantially between states, districts and communities.The aim of this review is toaim is to identify, describe,synthesize andsummarize online available published studies on assessment of nutritional status of preschool children conductedin various socioeconomically disadvantaged areas of India. A total of 21 scientific papers were considered for this study. In the considered papers the sample sizes ranged from 30 to 1032 children. The data for this paper was collected from original published research articles searched through Goggle Scholar, PubMed, Medline, Scopus and Science Direct database. The study showed that undernutrition in the form of underweight, stunting and wasting was found to be widely prevalent among preschool children. Several risk factors associated with underweight, stunting and wasting of preschool children were identified. Childhood underweights, stunting and wasting are consistently associated with male sex, age, family size and other socio-economic characteristics.The study found that children below 5 years from low socio-economic strata had a higher risk of being undernourished and confirmed the vicious cycle of acute illness and undernutrition.Nutrition, health education and good access and utilization of healthcare can be very effective interventions which could result in substantial reduction in undernutrition prevalent in socio-economically disadvantaged preschool children. Nutrition education should be imparted to mothers to improve quality of food provided to the children. Continuous monitoring and surveillance of Anganwadi centres could identify underlying factors of malnutrition, thus help in the planning of preventive strategies.