Infant’s Birth History and Low Birth Weight Increases Risk of Stunting Cases

Abstract

A nutrition-related problem that profoundly affects the quality of human resources is the high cases of children with stunting. One of the risk factors of children with stunting is low birth weight history. The research aims to analyze the relations between lowbirth weight history with stunting cases. The research used case-control retrospective and involved 188 children as the sample, divided into a case group and a control group, in which each group was composed of 94 children selected by cluster sampling. The univariate data analysis was conducted with frequency distribution, while the bivariate analysis was carried out with a chi-square test. The chisquare test showed a p-value of 0,000 (α < 0,05) and OR value of 9,615, implying the relationship between low birth weight and stunting cases. Children with low birth weight were nine-time higher to be prone to suffer from stunting, as opposed to children with healthy birthweight. Health workers, therefore, are urged to enhance the understanding of pregnant mothers and their families concerning the risk of lowbirth weight stop revent stunting as early as possible. Keywords— Low birth weight, infant, stunting