Assessing Child Nutrition: Problems with Anthropometric Measures as a Proxy for Child Health in Malnourished Populations

During the past few decades, Bangladeshi children under age 10 have experienced significant improvements in nutrition, and sex differences in child nutrition have declined significantly regardless of family structure, a major change from previous observations in Matlab. However, our attempts to understand child nutrition in developing countries are hindered by problems with the measures used to evaluate health. The anthropometric proxies commonly used to judge nutrition (BMI, weight-for-age and height-for-age) often fail to capture the true health status of children in undernourished populations. Further, the standard of comparison based on U.S. children misclassifies a large number of children in Bangladesh as malnourished, particularly in the adolescent years. We explore nutrition in Matlab, Bangladesh, using measures of acute and chronic morbidity to assess whether and how anthropometri