Overweight and obesity among under-five children in South Asia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In parallel with high prevalence of undernutrition, the low-middle-income countries like those in South Asia are experiencing an increasing burden of overweight and obesity among under-five children. The present study aims to measure the prevalence of overweight and obesity and their sociodemographic correlates among under-five children in selected South Asian countries.Methods Cross-sectional data on 132,231 mother-child pairs were extracted from Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in Bangladesh (2014), India (2015–16), Maldives (2016–17), Nepal (2016) and Pakistan (2017–18). Singleton children aged 6 to 59 months regardless of breastfeeding status were included in the analysis. Childhood overweight (>2 SD) and obesity (>3 SD) were measured by BMI z-Scores using WHO guidelines for reference population. Generalised linear models (binomial family) were used to analyse the risk ratios of having overweight/obesity.Results The overall prevalence of overweight and obese children was 1.91% and 0.89%, respectively, with the prevalence being highest in Maldives (3.9% and 1.5%, respectively) and lowest in Nepal (1.2% and 0.2%, respectively). Child’s dietary diversity, maternal BMI and education, and household wealth status were significantly associated with childhood overweight/obesity. Having adequate dietary diversity increased the risk of overweight/obesity by 27% [RR = 1.27, 95%CI = 1.13,1.42]. Children whose mothers had normal [RR = 1.81, 95%CI = 1.62,2.03], overweight [RR = 1.99, 95%CI = 1.71,2.31] and obesity [RR = 1.88, 95%CI = 1.48,2.40] had higher risks of having overweight/obesity. Children from households that ranked higher in the wealth quintile also had a higher risk of having overweight/obesity.Conclusion The prevalence of overweight and obesity among under-five children in South Asian countries is relatively low compared with that in high-income countries. There exists important sociodemographic pattern in the distribution of childhood overweight/obesity across the countries, signifying the role of socio-cultural factors in the epidemiology of overnutrition in this population.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".