South Asia is the region with the world’s highest burden of stunting, housing approximately a third of the world’s stunted children. The persistent, high rates of stunting in South Asia suggest a need to go beyond establishing its prevalence and associated factors, to additionally measure growth faltering (i.e., abnormally low linear growth velocity) to detect its extent, timing, severity and associated antecedent risk factors.
In this webinar, speakers will present work of the USAID Innovation Lab for Nutrition on examining trends in stunting in modern Nepal. They will explore and propose evaluating preschool linear growth velocities in a population through the use of a novel, sex-specific, annualized growth reference that can reveal the burden of insufficient growth throughout all preschool years. They propose that this approach may help Nepal and other countries in the region detect and initiate measures to prevent growth faltering, possibly before children become stunted.
Moderator:
Dr. Keith West Jr., George G. Graham Professor of Infant and Child Nutrition, and Director of the Sight and Life Global Nutrition Research Institute in the Department of International Health at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Speakers:
Dr. Andrew Thorne-Lyman, Associate Scientist and Nutrition Epidemiologist in the Center for Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Dr. Swetha Manohar, Fellow at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) with a joint appointment at the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s (JHSPH) Department of International Health, at Johns Hopkins University, and Co-Investigator and part of the core research team at the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Nutrition-Asia
