Abstract
A double burden of malnutrition occurs when individuals, household members or communities experience both undernutrition and overweight. Here, we show geospatial estimates of overweight and wasting prevalence among children under 5 years of age in 105 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) from 2000 to 2017 and aggregate these to policy-relevant administrative units. Wasting decreased overall across LMICs between 2000 and 2017, from 8.4% (62.3 (55.1-70.8) million) to 6.4% (58.3 (47.6-70.7) million), but is predicted to remain above the World Health Organization's Global Nutrition Target of <5% in over half of LMICs by 2025. Prevalence of overweight increased from 5.2% (30 (22.8-38.5) million) in 2000 to 6.0% (55.5 (44.8-67.9) million) children aged under 5 years in 2017. Areas most affected by double burden of malnutrition were located in Indonesia, Thailand, southeastern China, Botswana, Cameroon and central Nigeria. Our estimates provide a new perspective to researchers, policy makers and public health agencies in their efforts to address this global childhood syndemic.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 750-759 |
Number of pages | 10 |
Journal | Nature Medicine |
Volume | 26 |
Issue number | 5 |
Early online date | 20 Apr 2020 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 1 May 2020 |
Bibliographical note
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.Keywords
- Child
- Child, Preschool
- Demography
- Developing Countries/statistics & numerical data
- Female
- Geographic Mapping
- Humans
- Income/statistics & numerical data
- Infant
- Infant, Newborn
- Male
- Malnutrition/epidemiology
- Nutritional Status
- Overweight/epidemiology
- Pediatric Obesity/epidemiology
- Poverty/statistics & numerical data
- Prevalence
- Social Class
- Wasting Syndrome/epidemiology
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all)