Testing Indicators for Use in Monitoring Interventions to Improve Women's Nutritional Status

Author(s): Adair L

Year: 1998

Abstract:
The Reproductive Health Indicators Working Group of the Evaluation Project developed a series of indicators for the evaluation of reproductive health programs. We examined a subset of indicators of women's nutritional status using data from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey (CLHNS). The CLHNS is an ongoing community-based study of more than 2,200 mothers in Metro Cebu, the second largest and most rapidly growing area of the Philippines. Our analysis had a focus on intermediate and long term outcomes of undernutrition, including meal patterns and consumption of vitamin A rich foods, low birth weight (LBW) and a range of anthropometric indicators of nutritional status. We present prevalence of each indicator in the Cebu cohort at selected points in time, assess the degree to which each indicator adequately characterizes nutritional risk, determine the degree to which different nutritional indicators lead us to the same conclusions about h ealth or nutritional status, and assess how the prevalence of indicators changes over time as women age.