Estimating Childhood Stunting and Overweight Trends in the European Region from Sparse Longitudinal Data.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Monitoring countries' progress toward the achievement of their nutrition targets is an important task, but data sparsity makes monitoring trends challenging. Childhood stunting and overweight data in the European region over the last 30 y have had low coverage and frequency, with most data only covering a portion of the complete age interval of 0-59 mo.

Objectives

We implemented a statistical method to extract useful information on child malnutrition trends from sparse longitudinal data for these indicators.

Methods

Heteroscedastic penalized longitudinal mixed models were used to accommodate data sparsity and predict region-wide, country-level trends over time. We leveraged prevalence estimates stratified by sex and partial age intervals (i.e., intervals th

SUBMITTER: Saraswati CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9258559 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature