Relationship between the mothers' nutritional status with that of a child population from são Tomé Principe, Africa

Abstract

Objectives: analyse the relation between the nutritional status of children with 0 to 60 months in São Tome and Principe (STP) and their mothers. Methods: characterization of the nutritional status of 1,169 children for the weight/length ratio (W/L) (24months) and Body Mass Index (BMI) for age (>24months) and their mothers. The Chi Square or Fisher tests were used for the study on the relation between the nutritional status of the mother and children, as appropriate. Results: fifty-five percent (55%) of the children are female (median = 21 months). There was a high percentage of global acute malnutrition in the children aged024months (30.2%) and 2460months (22%) as well as global chronic malnutrition (32% and 41.1% respec-tively). We observed a high percentage of overweight/obese mothers (31.6%), with 16.5% of them being of a low height. We observed a significantly higher percentage of children with global acute malnutrition 47.5%) when compared with that which was reported for children of normal mothers (27.9%) or overweight/obese (22%) (p<0,001) mothers. Conclusions: It was observed a high prevalence of acute and chronic global malnutrition in the children studied and a high prevalence of overweight/obese mothers. We observed a statistically significant association between maternal and acute global malnutrition of the children.