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Do socio-economic inequalities in infant growth in rural India operate through maternal size and birth weight?

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posted on 2016-01-14, 11:16 authored by Paula GriffithsPaula Griffiths, Nagalla Balakrishna, Sylvia Fernandez Rao, Will JohnsonWill Johnson
Background 3·1 million young children die every year from undernutrition. Greater understanding of associations between socio-economic status (SES) and the biological factors that shape undernutrition are required to target interventions. Aim To establish whether SES inequalities in undernutrition, proxied by infant size at 12 months, operate through maternal and early infant size measures. Participants and Methods The sample comprised 347 Indian infants born in 60 villages in rural Andhra Pradesh 2005-2007. Structural equation path models were applied to decompose the total relationship between SES (standard of living index) and length and weight for age Z-scores (LAZ/ WAZ) at 12 months into direct and indirect (operating through maternal BMI and height, birthweight Z-score and LAZ/WAZ at 6 months) paths. Results SES had a direct positive association with LAZ (Standardized coefficient = 0.08, 95% CI = 0.02, 0.13) and WAZ at age 12 months (Standardized coefficient = 0.08, 95%CI = 0.02, 0.15). It also had additional indirect positive associations through increased maternal height and subsequently increased birthweight and WAZ/LAZ at 6 months, accounting for 35% and 53% of the total effect for WAZ and LAZ respectively. Conclusion Findings support targeting evidence based growth interventions towards infants from the poorest families with the shortest mothers. Increasing SES can improve growth for two generations.

Funding

The IFS received its funding under the Indo-US joint initiative on Maternal Child Health Development Research between the National Institute of Health, USA (5 R01 HD042219-S1) and the Indian Council of Medical Research, India, with additional funding from UNICEF/New York.

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Annals of Human Biology

Citation

GRIFFITHS, P.L. ...et al., 2016. Do socio-economic inequalities in infant growth in rural India operate through maternal size and birth weight?. Annals of Human Biology, 43(2), pp.154-163.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2016

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Annals of Human Biology on 05 Feb 2016, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.3109/03014460.2015.1134656

ISSN

1464-5033

Language

  • en