Socioeconomic status, anthropometric status, and psychomotor development of Kenyan children from resource-limited settings: A path-analytic study
Section snippets
Study setting
The study took place at two sites. The first site was the Kenya Medical Research Institute, Centre for Geographic Medicine Research (Coast), Kilifi, Kenya. Kilifi is situated in a predominantly rural community. The majority of families depend upon subsistence farming with approximately (67%) of the population in the district living below the poverty line [21]. The majority of the population in Kilifi belong to the Mijikenda ethnic/linguistic group. Two Bantu languages are mostly spoken in the
Anthropometric status
Approximately 49% (N = 100) of the children were stunted, and 19.6% (N = 40) were underweight as measured by HAZ and WAZ scores below − 2 SD, respectively. Results indicate that rural children were more likely to be stunted (57%) than urban children (41.3%) were. A Pearson chi square test showed that this difference was significant (χ2(1, N = 204) =4.99, p = 0.03). The difference in percentage of children who were underweight was not significantly different for the urban and rural group (rural: 23%,
Discussion
Consistent with previous studies we found a relationship between SES indicators and HAZ, WAZ, and MUACZ [32], [33], [34], [35]. We also found that anthropometric status was significantly correlated with psychomotor performance which is consistent with earlier reports [36], [37], [38]. The psychomotor performance of children experiencing poor physical growth ranged from moderate delay for stunting, being underweight and MUACZ, to severe delay for those with poor head growth, as indicated by the
Acknowledgements
This paper is published with permission from the Director of KEMRI. Amina Abubakar and Penny Holding were supported by the NIMH Fogarty R21award (Grant MH72597-02). Professor Charles Newton is funded by the Wellcome Trust, UK (070114). The authors would like to thank B. Kabunda, R. Mapenzi, C. Mapenzi, P. Nzai, J. Maitha, M. Mwangome, E. Obiero, K. Rimba and G. Bomu for their role in the data collection, and K. Katana and P. Kadii for data entry. Our sincere gratitude goes to the families that
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