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Nutrition indicators

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Most population nutrition indicators can be presented as prevalences. That is, the proportion of the population subgroup (young children, adult women, etc.) which has a specific form of malnutrition. When presenting a prevalence, the population group must always be specified because the prevalence of some forms of malnutrition, such as acute protein-energy malnutrition and anaemia, differ a great deal between age- and sex-specific groups. For example, it is not useful to say that the prevalence of anaemia in a population is 22%; in an emergency-affected population in a less-developed country, this would be an excellent result for young children but catastrophic in adult men. Moreover, the causes of anaemia and interventions to prevent anaemia are quite different in different population subgroups. For this reason, for most forms of malnutrition, subgroups should never be combined in order to calculate a single prevalence.

The distribution of anthropometric indices or other quantitative indicators of nutritional status can be displayed on a graph to show the distribution of nutritional status in the survey sample. This often indicates that the entire population is shifted to the left, that is, everyone is affected to some extent. Those individuals who had borderline nutritional status now are malnourished. Those who had more reserves may not yet be defined as having malnutrition, but they are still worse off than before. Graphs are also assist the reader in visualizing differences between different populations.

Badghis Province, Afghanistan

This figure shows a slight shift to the left of the distribution curve for weight-for-height z-scores compared to the reference population.

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Badghis Province, Afghanistan

BMI does not use a reference population, so there is no curve against which to compare the survey results. Nonetheless, you can see from this curve that a few women had a BMI less than 17.0

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Refugee camps in Kenya

This graph compares the distribution of haemoglobin measurements in two populations of adolescent refugees - one in Kakuma Camp and the other in three camps in Dadaab. You can see that the distribution for Kakuma is slightly displaced to the left compared to the distribution from the Dadaab camps, meaning that the aenemia situation was slightly worse in Kakuma.

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