Comparison of estimates of under-nutrition for pre-school rural Pakistani children based on the WHO standard and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: To compare estimates of under-nutrition among pre-school Pakistani children using the WHO growth standard and the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reference. DESIGN: Prevalence of stunting, wasting and underweight as defined by WHO and NCHS standards are calculated and compared. SETTING: The data are from two cross-sectional surveys conducted in the early 1990s, the time frame for setting the baseline for the Millennium Development Goals: (i) National Health Survey of Pakistan (NHSP) assessed the health status of a nationally representative sample and (ii) Thatta Health System Research Project (THSRP) was a survey in Thatta, a rural district of Sindh Province. SUBJECTS: In all, 1533 and 1051 children aged 0-35 months from national and Thatta surveys, respectively. RESULTS: WHO standard gave a significantly higher prevalence of stunting for both national [36.7 (95 % CI 33.2, 40.2)] and Thatta surveys [52.9 (95 % CI 48.9, 56.9)] compared to the NCHS reference [national: 29.1 (95 % CI 25.9, 32.2) and Thatta: 44.8 (95 % CI 41.1, 48.5), respectively]. It also gave significantly higher prevalence of wasting for the Thatta survey [22.9 (95 % CI 20.3, 25.5)] compared to the NCHS reference [15.7 (95 % CI 13.5, 17.8)]. Differences due to choice of standard were pronounced during infancy and for severely wasted and severely stunted children. CONCLUSIONS: Pakistan should switch to the robustly constructed and up-to-date WHO growth standard for assessing under-nutrition. New growth charts should be introduced along with training of health workers. This has implications for nutritional intervention programmes, for resetting the country's targets for Millennium Development Goal 1 and for monitoring nutritional trends.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".