Childhood growth, schooling, and cognitive development: further evidence from the Young Lives study

This study is based on research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Global Health Grant OPP1032713), the Eunice Shriver Kennedy National Institute of Child Health and Development
(Grant R01 HD070993) and Grand Challenges Canada (Grant 0072–03 )

/pdf/growth-faltering-and-recovery-in-children-aged-1-8-years-in-34mqp6kxzg.pdf

Growth faltering and recovery in children aged 1-8 years in four low- and middle-income countries: Young Lives.

The emerging world is pervasive and strives towards integrating people, technology , environment, and knowledge. This emerging vision is moving towards approaches that set the user at the center of attention, while technology becomes invisible, hidden in the natural surrounding, but still functional, autonomous, self-adaptive, present when needed and interactive [Vasilakos et al. 2009]. Achieving this vision requires innovative network architectures and services. Communication/networking approaches should become task-and knowledge-driven, enabling a service-oriented, requirement, and trust-driven development of communication networks. The growing complexity of control requires increasingly distributed and self-organizing structures, relying on simple and dependable elements that are able to collaborate to construct sophisticated behaviors and that can adapt to an evolving situation in which new resources can become available, administrative domains can change, and economic models can vary accordingly. The networking and seamless integration of concepts, technologies, and devices in a dynamically changing environment poses many challenges to the research community. We are definitely faced with issue explores the challenges in technologies that will help realize the vision where devices and applications seamlessly interconnect, intelligently cooperate, and autonomously manage themselves, and, as a result, the borders of the virtual and real world will vanish or become significantly blurred. The articles forming the special issue are testimony to the challenges and prospects of this rapidly growing area. Psychology addresses the major challenges one encounters in operation of WiMax networks that come with large-scale reliable multicast and broadcast services. The main problem limiting the scalability of such networks is feedback implosion, a phenomenon arising when a large number of users transmit their feedback messages through the network, thus occupying a significant portion of the system resources. Inspired by social psychology, and more specifically by the phenomenon of bystander effect, an autonomic framework for provisioning of large-scale reliable multicast services is presented. The self-configuring and self-optimizing procedures of the proposed au-tonomic manager component are modeled using game theory. Through some analytical modeling and simulations of the proposed scheme carried out to evaluate its performance, is found to the new approach suppress feedback messages very effectively, while at the same time, not degrading the data transfer timelines.

Editorial to the special issue

https://pureadmin.qub.ac.uk/ws/files/136420753/Stunting_SSM.pdf

Understanding the Association between Stunting and Child Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Next Steps for Research and Intervention

Evidence from studies conducted in nutritionally deprived children in low- and middle-income countries (LIMC) in past decades showed little or no population-level catch-up in linear growth (mostly defined as reductions in the absolute height deficit) after 2 years of age. Recent studies, however, have reported population-level catch-up growth in children, defined as positive changes in mean height-for-age z-scores (HAZ). The aim of this paper was to assess whether population-level catch-up in linear growth is found when height-for-age difference (HAD: child’s height compared to standard, expressed in centimeters) is used instead of HAZ. Our premise is that HAZ is inappropriate to measure changes in linear growth over time because they are constructed using standard deviations from cross-sectional data. We compare changes in growth in populations of children between 2 and 5 years using HAD vs. HAZ using cross-sectional data from 6 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) and longitudinal data from the Young Lives and the Consortium on Health-Orientated Research in Transitional Societies (COHORTS) studies. Using HAD, we find not only an absence of population-level catch-up in linear growth, but a continued deterioration reflected in a decrease in mean HAD between 2 and 5 years; by contrast, HAZ shows either no change (DHS surveys) or an improvement in mean HAZ (some of the longitudinal data). Population-level growth velocity was also lower than expected (based on standards) in all four Young Lives data sets, confirming the absence of catch-up growth in height. We show no evidence of population-level catch-up in linear growth in children between 2 to 5 years of age when using HAD (a measure more appropriate than HAZ to document changes as populations of children age), but a continued deterioration reflected in a decrease in mean HAD. The continued widening of the absolute height deficit after 2 years of age does not challenge the critical importance of investing in improving nutrition during the first 1000 days (i.e., from conception to 2 years of age), but raises a number of research questions including how to prevent continued deterioration and what is the potential of children to benefit from nutrition interventions after 2 years of age. Preventing, rather than reversing linear growth retardation remains the priority for reducing the global burden of malnutritionworldwide.

/pdf/using-height-for-age-differences-had-instead-of-height-for-4kvkp0fxte.pdf

Using height-for-age differences (HAD) instead of height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) for the meaningful measurement of population-level catch-up in linear growth in children less than 5 years of age

Young Lives is an international longitudinal study investigating the changing nature of childhood poverty in four low-income countries [Ethiopia, India (Andhra Pradesh), Peru and Vietnam] over a 15-year period. In each country, the cohort is comprised of ≈ 2000 children aged between 6 and 18 months and up to 1000 children aged between 7 and 8 years, recruited in 2002 and sampled from 20 sentinel sites. The first survey data collection from primary caregivers and older children took place in 2002, the second in 2006-07 and the third in 2009-10. Data on the community contexts were collected to complement the household surveys. To elaborate and extend the quantitative data, longitudinal qualitative research with a subgroup of the children was carried out in 2007, 2008 and 2010-11. Topic areas covered included nutrition, health and well-being, cognitive and physical development, health behaviours and education, as well as the social, demographic and economic status of the household. Survey data from the study are archived in the International Section of the UK Public Data Archive.

/pdf/cohort-profile-the-young-lives-study-3ykyh0v33h.pdf

S Galab

Papers

Cohort Profile: The Young Lives Study