Malnutrition: Prevalence, risk factors and outcomes

Malnutrition is a worldwide burden to human societies. According to the UNICEF, recent global estimates indicate that nearly 60 million children have a moderate form of malnutrition, and 13 million have a severe form of malnutrition. Early nutrition and health, social and demographic factors and welfare distributions have potential significant impact on childhood health and cognitive development. Malnutrition in childhood affects the future productivity of a society and it is an associated cause in about half of all deaths occurring among children in developing countries with severe malnutrition associated with 1 to 2 million preventable child deaths each year. Even children with moderate malnutrition had an increased risk of dying. This book is a start of the art presentation of malnutrition research, bridging classic descriptive ideas and conventional statistical estimation concepts with a number of robust computing-intensive modelling methodologies including the small area estimations. These advanced methodologies are useful to analyse the massively increasing health data across the globe. Detailed empirical results from various country-specific datasets for identifying the prevalence, determining significant risk factors and outcomes of malnutrition are thoroughly presented into different chapters. This book is designed for graduate students, academics, professionals and applied practitioners who are generally interested in malnutrition research through knowing the advancements of modelling tools and techniques and dealing with various social to policy issues due to malnutrition outcomes.