Sumera Akram, Muhammad Ahmed Khan, Hassan Bin Usman, Syed Qamar Zaman.
Assessment of the Nutritional Status of Primary School Children in Shangla.
Pak Paed J Jan ;41(1):9-13.

Objective: To assess the nutritional status of primary school children in Shangla valley. Study design: Cross Sectional Descriptive Study. Place & Duration: The study was carried out in a primary school in Shangla named “Makhozai Primary School Kuzpao, Shangla”. The study was carried out in July 2014. Materials & Methods: The authors visited the primary school and anthropometric measurements of all the enrolled children from KG class to class 5 were taken and recorded with help of necessary equipment (weight machine, height meter, measuring tapes). BMI was calculated and the subjects were categorized into four categories (underweight, healthy weight, overweight and obese) after plotting their BMI value on BMI for age percentiles charts. The monthly income and parental education level was also recorded. All the data were recorded on structured Proforma and was analyzed with help of statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) 20. Results: There were total 310 children who were part of the study in subject school. The age range was from 4 years to 14 years, mean age was 8.72 (SD + 2.64). There were 246 male students and 64 female students in the school. There were 174 children (56.1%) who were underweight. 121(39%) were healthy, 13 (4.1%) were overweight and 2 cases (0.6%) obese. The study shows strong association of higher income and better education with healthy BMI status of children, p=0.013 and p=0.025 respectively. Conclusion: Nutritional status of primary school children is poor in Shangla. Therefore it is evident that malnutrition is an important public health problem among school children. There is a great need for policy makers to address this issue through food intervention programmes and enhancing awareness of masses to improve health of children.

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