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, we will present work from the USAID Innovation Lab for Nutrition examining trends in stunting in modern Nepal, spanning the past half-century, during periods of decline and pause up to the present time, concluding that innovation is needed to progress further. We will explore and propose evaluating preschool linear growth velocities in a population, introducing the use of a novel, sex-specific, annualized growth reference to reveal the burden of insufficient growth throughout all preschool years. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by revealing the prevalence of low linear growth velocity (<-2 Z-scores) by age and sex in the plains (Terai) of Nepal, and identifying covarying risk factors, across the height-for-age spectrum. We 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 - Keith P. West, Jr., Dr.P.H., M.P.H., R.D. is the 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 in Baltimore, Maryland. He completed his dietetic internship at Walter Reed General Hospital and earned his Masters’ and Doctoral Degrees in Public Health at Johns Hopkins. Dr. West has worked in Southern Asia (Indonesia, Bangladesh and Nepal), the Western Pacific (Philippines and Micronesia) and Sub-Saharan Africa (Malawi and Zambia), conducting collaborative research to prevent health consequences and reduce mortality due to micronutrient deficiencies in infants, children and women. He has served as the Johns Hopkins sub-award lead for Nutrition Innovation Lab activities, designing a nationally representative, multiyear, surveillance system (PoSHAN Studies) to assess pathways from agriculture-to-nutrition in Nepal. Professor West has authored over 260 scientific publications, and is a recipient of the International Nutrition Prize, a Fellow and is the current Director At-Large for Global Nutrition in the American Society of Nutrition.
Panelists:
Dr. Andrew Thorne-Lyman - Andrew Thorne-Lyman is an Associate Scientist and Nutrition Epidemiologist in the Center for Human Nutrition at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. His research explores links between food systems, diets, and nutrition and health outcomes and the development and validation of indicators to measure the effectiveness of nutrition programs. He has a doctoral degree in nutrition from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and a Master’s in Health Science degree from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Dr. Swetha Manohar - Swetha Manohar is a Fellow at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and holds a joint appointment with the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s (JHSPH) Department of International Health, at Johns Hopkins University. She is part of the Global Food Ethics and Policy Program’s faculty where she works on the program’s upcoming research on evaluating the sustainability of dietary intake and food environments in Southeast Asia and examining rural deprivation and food insecurity experiences among women in Southern Asia. Her other research interests include child growth, factors influencing growth, as well as, short- and long-term consequences of impaired growth. Previously, Swetha was the Project Scientist for the Feed the Future Innovation Lab and led JHU research and capacity building initiatives in Nepal for the project’s activities from 2011-2015. She continues to serve as a Co-Investigator and is part of the core research team for the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Nutrition-Asia.