Estado nutricional de niñas y niños: 6 a 59 meses de edad. Centro de salud Nulti. Enero-junio de 2019

Abstract

BACKGROUND: nutrition establishes growth and integrated child development. Malnutrition continues being a public health problem in Ecuador, which it leads to a high morbidity and mortality rates. GENERAL OBJECTIVE: to describe the nutritional status in children between the ages of 6 to 59 months who consulted at Nulti’s health center between January to June of 2019. METODOLOGY: it was conducted a descriptive cross-sectional study, with a universe of 1200 children and a probability sample of 182 children. A sample was collected from children’s medical records, It was identified the nutritional status according to anthropometric measurements: weight, height or length and BMI, they were located on WHO child growth standards. It was classified in adequate nutritional status, emaciation, underweight, stunting, overweight and obesity. In the demographic data it was considered age, child’s sex, level of education, occupation, marital status, ethnicity of caregiver, and residency. Also, it was obtained the micronutrients supplementation frequency, the data tabulation and analysis were descriptive bivariate analysis between the nutritional status and demographic variables, micronutrients reception, through chi square and prevalence ratio with 95% confidence. RESULTS: malnutrition frequency was 26,4%, it was identified association between nutritional status and age range (P: 0.013, PR: 0.40, CI95%: 0.19-0.83). Featuring a higher malnutrition frequency on infants, it didn’t identify relation between nutritional status and child’s sex, level of education, occupation, marital status, ethnicity of caregiver, residency and micronutrients reception, Adherence to micronutrients prescription was 93.4% at least with one micronutrient per child, being the most prescribed Vitamin A with a 92.4% and being the less prescribed was iron with 13,1%. CONCLUSION: it exists a decrease on malnutrition’s percentage compared to previous data in Ecuador.