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Using the Uganda National Panel Survey to analyze the effect of staple food consumption on undernourishment in Ugandan children

Overview of attention for article published in BMC Public Health, July 2017
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  • In the top 25% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • Good Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (79th percentile)
  • Good Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (65th percentile)

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Title
Using the Uganda National Panel Survey to analyze the effect of staple food consumption on undernourishment in Ugandan children
Published in
BMC Public Health, July 2017
DOI 10.1186/s12889-017-4576-1
Pubmed ID
Authors

Michelle M. Amaral, William E. Herrin, Grace Bulenzi Gulere

Abstract

The United Nations' Millennium Development Goals Report, 2015, documents that, since 1990, the number of stunted children in sub-Saharan Africa has increased by 33% even though it has fallen in all other world regions. Recognizing this, in 2011 the Government of Uganda implemented a 5-year Nutrition Action Plan. One important tenet of the Plan is to lessen malnutrition in young children by discouraging over-consumption of nutritionally deficient, but plentiful, staple foods, which it defines as a type of food insecurity. We use a sample of 6101 observations on 3427 children age five or less compiled from three annual waves of the Uganda National Panel Survey to measure undernourishment. We also use the World Health Organization's Child Growth Standards to create a binary variable indicating stunting and another indicating wasting for each child in each year. We then use random effects to estimate binary logistic regressions that show that greater staple food concentrations affect the probability of stunting and wasting. The estimated coefficients are used to compute adjusted odds ratios (OR) that estimate the effect of greater staple food concentration on the likelihood of stunting and the likelihood of wasting. Controlling for other relevant covariates, these odds ratios show that a greater proportion of staple foods in a child's diet increases the likelihood of stunting (OR = 1.007, p = 0.005) as well as wasting (OR = 1.011, p = 0.034). Stunting is confirmed with subsamples of males only (OR = 1.006, p = 0.05) and females only (OR = 1.008, p = 0.027), suggesting that the finding is not gender specific. Another subsample of children aged 12 months or less, most of whom do not yet consume solid food, shows no statistically significant relationship, thus supporting the validity of the other findings. Diets containing larger proportions of staple foods are associated with greater likelihoods of both stunting and wasting in Ugandan children. Other causes of stunting and wasting identified in past research are also confirmed with the Uganda data. Finally, the analysis provides clues to other possible causes of undernourishment in young children.

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X Demographics

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Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 135 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
Unknown 135 100%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Master 33 24%
Student > Ph. D. Student 14 10%
Researcher 13 10%
Student > Bachelor 13 10%
Student > Postgraduate 5 4%
Other 13 10%
Unknown 44 33%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Nursing and Health Professions 24 18%
Medicine and Dentistry 16 12%
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 12 9%
Economics, Econometrics and Finance 11 8%
Social Sciences 8 6%
Other 16 12%
Unknown 48 36%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 9. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 20 June 2019.
All research outputs
#3,591,505
of 22,997,544 outputs
Outputs from BMC Public Health
#3,885
of 14,984 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#64,266
of 315,207 outputs
Outputs of similar age from BMC Public Health
#66
of 190 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 22,997,544 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 84th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 14,984 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 14.0. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 74% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 315,207 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 79% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 190 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 65% of its contemporaries.