Abstract
Objective
This paper attempts to investigate the determinants of child malnutrition in Bangladesh by using a data set obtained from Urban Health Survey (UHS) 2013.
Study design and method
The UHS 2013 followed a stratified three-stage sampling procedure. Information on maternal and child characteristics was collected from the last child born preceding three years of survey. Robust quantile regression (QR) models have been used to find out potential factors responsible for child malnutrition of urban areas of Bangladesh using standardized stunting score as dependent variable.
Results
Place of residence (Domain), mother’s age at birth of index child, gender of the child, wealth index, education of mother, working status of mother, access to media, antenatal care, and place of delivery were found to have significant association with the malnutrition of children of urban areas of Bangladesh.
Conclusion
Some recommendations have been suggested to improve the nutrition status of children of urban areas of Bangladesh.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Altman DG, Royston P (2006) The cost of dichotomising continuous variables. Br Med J 332(7549):1080
Austin PC, Brunner LJ (2004) Inflation of the type I error rate when a continuous confounding variable is categorized in logistic regression analyses. Stat Med 23:1159–1178
Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 2014
Chen H, Cohen P, Chen S (2007) Biased odds ratios from dichotomization of age. Stat Med 26(18):3487–3497
Das S, Gulshan J (2017) Different forms of malnutrition among under five children in Bangladesh: a cross sectional study on prevalence and determinants. BMC Nutrition 3(1):1
Davino C, Furno M, Vistocco D (2013) Quantile regression: theory and applications. John Wiley & Sons
De Onis M, Blössner M (2003) The World Health Organization global database on child growth and malnutrition: methodology and applications. Int J Epidemiol 32(4):518–526
Draper NR, Smith H (1998) Applied regression analysis. John Wiley & Sons
Fedorov V, Mannino F, Zhang R (2009) Consequences of dichotomization. Pharm Stat J Appl Stat Pharm Ind 8(1):50–61
Hong R, Banta JE, Betancourt JA (2006) Relationship between household wealth inequality and chronic childhood under-nutrition in Bangladesh. Int J Equity Health 5(1):15
Hossain MZ (2001) Rural-urban migration in Bangladesh: a micro-level study. In Brazil IUSSP conference 20–24
Jesmin A, Yamamoto SS, Malik AA, Haque MA (2011) Prevalence and determinants of chronic malnutrition among preschool children: a cross-sectional study in Dhaka City, Bangladesh. J Health Popul Nutr 29(5):494
Koenker R, Bassett G Jr (1978) Regression quantiles. Econometrica: J Econ Soc 46:33–50
MacCallum RC, Zhang S, Preacher KJ, Rucker DD (2002) On the practice of dichotomization of quantitative variables. Psychol Methods 1:19
Maronna RA, Martin RD, Yohai VJ, Salibián-Barrera M (2019) Robust statistics: theory and methods (with R). John Wiley & Sons
Mohammad KA, Haque ME, Bari W (2017) Does community facility play a vital role on nutrition status of under-five children in Bangladesh. Dhaka Univ J Sci 65(1):27–33
Naggara O, Raymond J, Guilbert F, Roy D, Weill A, Altman DG (2011) Analysis by categorizing or dichotomizing continuous variables is inadvisable: an example from the natural history of unruptured aneurysms. Am J Neuroradiol 32(3):437–440
Nahar B, Ahmed T, Brown KH, Hossain MI (2010) Risk factors associated with severe underweight among young children reporting to a diarrhoea treatment facility in Bangladesh, Journal of health, population, and nutrition. 28(5):476
National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT), MEASURE Evaluation, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), and Associates for Community and Population Research (ACPR) (2006) Bangladesh Urban Health Survey. Dhaka, Bangladesh and Chapel Hill, NC, USA: NIPORT, MEASURE Evaluation, ICDDR,B, and ACPR; 2008
National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT), International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), MEASURE Evaluation. 2015. Bangladesh Urban Health Survey (2013) Final Report. Dhaka, Bangladesh and Chapel Hill, North Carolina (USA): NIPORT, icddr,b, and MEASURE Evaluation.
Niger T, Khatun S, Nurul I, Kazuhiro O (2010) Determinants of malnutrition among the children under 2 years of age. Pakistan J Nutr 9(1):27–34
Olsen CS, Clark AE, Thomas AM, Cook LJ (2012) Comparing least-squares and quantile regression approaches to Analyzing median hospital charges. Acad Emerg Med 19(7):866–875
Ragland DR (1992) Dichotomizing continuous outcome variables: dependence of the magnitude of association and statistical power on the cutpoint. Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass) 3(5):434–440
Rahman AZ, Biswas SC (2009) Nutritional status of under-5 children in Bangladesh. S Asian J Population Health 2(1):1–1
Rodriguez RN, Yao Y (2017) Five things you should know about quantile regression. In Proceedings of the SAS global forum 2017 conference, Orlando 2–5
Srinivasan CS, Zanello G, Shankar B (2013) Rural-urban disparities in child nutrition in Bangladesh and Nepal. BMC Public Health 13(1):581
Streiner DL (2002) Breaking up is hard to do: the heartbreak of dichotomizing continuous data. Can J Psychiatry 47(3):262–266
Talukder A (2017) Factors associated with malnutrition among under-five children: illustration using Bangladesh demographic and health survey, 2014 data. Children 4(10):88
UNICEF/WHO/World Bank (2019). Joint Child Malnutrition Estimates
World Health Organization (2002) Global strategy for infant and young child feeding. WHO, WHA 55/15
World Health Organization (2010) Child Mortality Levels: Probability of Dying per 1000 live Births, Data by County
Yeh CC, Wang KM, Suen YB (2009) Quantile analyzing the dynamic linkage between inflation uncertainty and inflation. Probl Perspect Manag 7(1):21–28
Acknowledgements
We thank Editor and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestion that helped a lot to improve the quality of the paper. We would like to express gratitude toward National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT), Bangladesh for giving us permission to use the UHS, 2013 data.
Funding
Authors did not receive any financial support for this research.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
MMI initiated the study and carried out literature review. MMI and WB conducted data analysis and prepared the draft of the manuscript. MMI and WB read and approved the final version of manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
Authors have no conflict of interest.
Ethical statement
The secondary data UHS, 2013 have been used in this paper and this data set is available in NIPORT.
Consent for publication
Not applicable.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Islam, M.M., Bari, W. Analysing malnutrition status of urban children in Bangladesh: quantile regression modelling. J Public Health (Berl.) 29, 815–822 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-019-01191-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10389-019-01191-0