Abstract

Introduction: Nutrition is a core pillar of human development and concrete, large-scale programming not only can reduce the burden of under nutrition and deprivation in countries but also can advance the progress of nations. Children under 3 years of age, an age which is nutritionally critical, 38% of children are stunted,18% wasted and 41% are underweight according to National Health and Family Welfare Survey 3 (NFHS-3). For such a great burden of malnutrition, particularly among children under three years of age there are very few studies done in India. Thus it becomes imperative that studies be carried out to gain a deeper understanding of the factors affecting the nutritional status of children. Keeping this in mind the present study is undertaken to determine the role of various factors influencing the nutritional status. Objectives: 1. To assess the nutritional status of children less than three years by anthropometric measurements. 2. To study association of nutritional status with age, gender, socioeconomic status, infant feeding & child feeding practices in terms of timing of initiation of exclusive breastfeeding, timing of complementary feeding & timing of family diet.Methodology: A Cross-sectional study was conducted in the Field practice area of Department of Community Medicine. Two - Stage stratified, probability proportional to size sampling technique was used to select study sample. A total of 934 mothers of children aged less than three years were contacted in the present study, 893 mothers responded to the interview (91.6%). The non response rate was (8.4%). The data was entered and analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 16. Summary: Among the study population, the prevalence of mild, moderate, severe and very severe underweight children were 103 (11.5%), 24(2.8%), 2 (0.2%) and 3 (0.3%) respectively. The data shows that male and female children had equal distribution of malnutrition. Among the study population, the prevalence of stunting, wasting and stunting & wasting was 28.1%, 16.1% and 7.7% respectively. Two forty three (52.3%) of male children had malnutrition as compared to 221(51.6%) of female children. The higher prevalence of malnutrition was observed among children belonging to lower socio-economic status, born with low birth weight, who had faulty initiation of breast feeds, complementary feeds and family diet