Does birth season correlate with childhood stunting? An input for astrological nutrition

(2022) 22:306 Linger Endalifer et al. BMC Pediatrics https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-022-03343-w Open Access RESEARCH Does birth season correlate with childhood stunting? An input for astrological nutrition Melese Linger Endalifer1*, Gedefaw Diress2, Bedilu Linger Endalifer3, Birhanu Wagaye4 and Hunegnaw Almaw5 Abstract Introduction: Chronic malnutrition is highly prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa and a severe public health problem in Ethiopia.At country level in the past three decades,the prevalence of stunting is above 40%.Different researchs and intervention were implemented in the past;but the progresss is non-remarkable.Despite; the effect of birth season on childhood chronic malnutrition was not studied yet in Ethiopia. Methods: This research was extracted from the 2016 demographic health survey of Ethiopia. The data was collected based on national and international scientific protocols. A total of 645 enumeration areas were selected for the national survey.The surevey uses two stage stratified sampling technique to gather data from the sampling unit. After excluding non eligible children a total of 8855 participants were included for final analysis.Height and weight were measured based on the standards nutritional assessment procedure.SPSS version 20 was used to analyze the data.Descriptive statistics were used to present the data. Binary and multivariable logistic regression models were regressed to identify the potential predictors.A p-value of less than 0.05 with 95% CI were used to declare an association. Result: The prevalence of stunting in Ethiopia was 38.7% (95% CI: 36.8, 40.6). Season of birth had a significant association with stunting. The odds of being stunted among children born in the spring season were decreased by 16% as compared to children born in the winter season. Conclusion: Children born in the spring season were less likely to be stunted (the so called October effect). The clear scientific relation between the season of birth and child anthropometric indicator is not well understood. Nutritional interventions and policies are better to consider the birth season of the child. Keywords: Season of birth, Spring, Stunting, Ethiopia Background Malnutrition is a global public health problem that affects the entire population. In the twenty-first century, the rates of under-nutrition and over-nutrition increased unpredictably. Unexpectedly developing countries suffered from a double burden of malnutrition the so-called *Correspondence: 1 Department of Human Nutrition, College of Health Science, Debre Markos University, Debre Markos, Ethiopia Full list of author information is available at the end of the article “DBM” at an individual, household, and community level [1, 2]. Undernutrition is a major public health problem among adolescents,children under-five years, and pregnant and lactating women in developing countries due to the vicious pattern of the problem. Majorly the problem is highly prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa [3–6]. Stunting is a form of chronic malnutrition in underfive children which is expressed in percent of median, Z-score, and percentiles. Based on the World Health Organization (WHO) cut-off value stunting is classified when the Z-score value is less than -2 [7]. © The Author(s) 2022. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativeco mmons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Linger Endalifer et al. BMC Pediatrics (2022) 22:306 Globally;21.3% of children under five years were stunted [3], of this 30% of them were in Sub-Saharan Africa.There is a little bit epidemiological reduction in the region [8, 9]. In the last two decades; there was observable stunting reduction in Ethiopia [10, 11]. Based on 2016, Ethiopia Demographic Health Survey (EDHS) report the prevalence of stunting was 38% and in the northern regions (highland areas) of Ethiopia (Tigray, Afar, and Amhara) stunting prevalence is above 40% which is greater than the national level [11]. The consequence of stunting is beyond the child’s health. It had social, economic, political, and health crises. Nationally Ethiopia costs about 16.5% of Gross Domestic Product per annum due to malnutrition [12]. Some of the health consequences of stunting are decreased intelligence ability and secondary malnutrition (late adulthood metabolic syndrome) [13]. Generally, the determinant factors and causes of stunting are interrelated and complex. It is a known fact that a bunch of researchers identified maternal, healthrelated, nutritional and sociodemographic factors [3–5, 8, 9, 13–49]. Even though a lot of research was conducted before in Ethiopia and worldwide the determinant factors explored and the methodology were almost similar. Surely, in Ethiopia, the effect of birth season on childhood malnutrition was not studied before. The government and different stakeholders put their effort to reduce malnutrition; although the progress is not satisfactory [50]. There is low energy and nutrient intake in the summer season due to temporal food insecurity (hunger) in Ethiopia [51].To know the effect of season on the nutritional status of children the current type of study is fundamental. As a result, we intend to assess the effect of the season of birth on stunting in Ethiopia nationally. Materials and methods Study setting and design The 2016 EDHS was designed to provide up-to-date estimates of key demographic and health indicators in Ethiopia. The data was collected from nine regions and two city administrations every five years.A detailed description of the study design and methodology the 2016 is found elsewhere [52].In brief; a stratified two-stage random sampling design was used to collect data from a nationally representative sample. In the first stage, a total of 645 Enumeration Areas (EA) (202 in urban areas and 443 in rural areas) were selected with probability proportional to EA size and with independent selection in each sampling stratum. In the second stage, a fixed number of 28 households per cluster were selected (...truncated)