Prevalence and Risk Factors of Anaemia among Children Aged between 6 Months and 14 Years in Kenya
Oscar Ngesa and
Henry Mwambi
PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 11, 1-10
Abstract:
Background: Anaemia is one of the significant public health problems among children in the world. Understanding risk factors of anaemia provides more insight to the nature and types of policies that can be put up to fight anaemia. We estimated the prevalence and risk factors of anaemia in a population-based, cross-sectional survey. Methodology: Blood samples from 11,711 children aged between 6 months and 14 years were collected using a single-use, spring-loaded, sterile lancet to make a finger prick. Anaemia was measured based on haemoglobin concentration level. The generalized linear model framework was used to analyse the data, in which the response variable was either a child was anemic or not anemic. Results: The overall prevalence of anaemia among the children in Kenya was estimated to be 28.8%. The risk of anaemia was found to decrease with age progressively with increase in each year of age; children below 1 year were at highest risk of anaemia. The risk of anaemia was significantly higher in male than female children. Mothers with secondary and above education had a protective effect on the risk of anaemia on their children. Malaria diagnosis status of a child was positively associated with risk anaemia. Conclusion: Controlling co-morbidity of malaria and improving maternal knowledge are potential options for reducing the burden of anaemia.
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113756 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 13756&type=printable (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0113756
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0113756
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().