Undernutrition remains one of the most pressing global health challenges today, affecting mainly infants and children. It comes in different forms: wasting (low weight-for-height, usually a result of severe and acute weight loss), stunting (low height-for-age, reflecting chronic or recurrent undernutrition), and being underweight as well as deficiencies in vitamins and minerals.
In 2020, there were still an estimated 149 million children under the age of 5 years exhibiting stunted growth and an estimated 45 million who were wasted. Cases mostly occur in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) from sub-Saharan Africa and Southi.
Over one million children die each year as a result of wasting and more than 250,000 die from stunting.
Childhood stunting has long-lasting physiologic effects and is associated with increased risk for adult diseases such as obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes.
Steady progress has been made to reduce stunting since 2000 in most regions of the world, but it remains insufficient.
Studies have emphasized that undernutrition cannot be ascribed solely to food security, and rather reflects the intersection of multiple factors, among which carriage of pathogens and impairment of intestinal functions observed in environmental enteropathies are key.
“By bringing together data from 33 major studies, we found that children who experience early growth faltering before six months old are much more likely to die, and much more likely to have severe forms of growth faltering, by the time they’re 18–24 months old,” said the papers’ senior author, Benjamin Arnold, PhD, MPH, associate professor at UCSF’s Francis I. Proctor Foundation.
“The early onset of growth faltering implies a very early window for intervention, in particular the prenatal period, and potentially broader interventions that help to improve nutrition among women of child bearing age.”
“Our findings suggest that if health interventions are not delivered before age six months, it is too late to prevent stunted growth for about a third of children in the populations represented in this study and as many as half of children in South Asia,” said Jade Benjamin-Chung, PhD, MPH, first author of a paper in the series and assistant professor at Stanford University.
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