Measuring Arm Circumference is a More Accurate Way to Determine Child Malnourishment

Determining whether or not a child is malnourished is crucial to getting them help. Now, researchers have discovered that measuring a child's upper arm circumference is a much better method than using current weight-based guidelines to determine malnourishment.

Children who visit health facilities in developing nations often have diarrhea, which can leech nutrients out of their system. The traditional measures for determining whether a child is moderately or severely malnourished are based on assessing a child's weight direction. However, diarrhea can cause dehydration, which affects a child's weight. This can lead to a misdiagnosis of patients.

"Because dehydration lowers a child's weight, using weight-based assessments in children presenting with diarrhea may be misleading," said Adam Levine, one of the researchers, in a news release. "When children are rehydrated and returned to a stable, pre-illness weight, they may still suffer from severe acute malnutrition."

In fact, Levine has found that measuring the arm circumference is a far more accurate way to diagnose patients.  Using a tape measure to measure the arm is also the most practical; tape measures are inexpensive and more readily available in resource-limited environments than scales.

In this latest study, the researchers studied the clients of an urban hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They analyzed 721 records of all children under 60 months of age who visited the hospital's rehydration unit with acute diarrhea. In all, they found that 12 to 14 percent of children were misclassified with malnutrition using weight-based measures compared to only 1 to 2 percent who were measured by arm circumference.

"Based on our results, clinicians and community workers can confidently use the mid-upper arm measurement to guide nutritional supplementation for children with diarrhea," said Levine.

The findings are important for developing nations were scales may not always be available. By measuring arm circumference, clinicians can better assess whether a child needs further nutritional care.

The findings are published in the Journal of Nutrition.

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