Assessing the Impact of Socioeconomic and Environmental Factors on the Body Mass Index of Children Aged 3-6 Years: A Cross-Sectional Study in Assam, India.

Abstract

Background: In Assam, India, 33% of children under the age of five are underweight, according to the National Family Health Survey-5 statistics. The Assam Agribusiness and Rural Transformation Project also discovered that 68% of Assam's children between the ages of 6 and 59 months are anemic. The goal of this study was to determine how socioeconomic and environmental factors affected the body mass index (BMI) of children in Assam, India, between the ages of 3 and 6 years old.

Material and methods: 385 kids had their anthropometric measurements taken. With a 5% margin of error and a 95% confidence interval, this sample size was calculated. To find statistically significant features, the collected data were analyzed using univariate Chi-square tests and multivariate regression analysis.

Results: Gender, parental employment status, lifestyle, and socio-economic conditions had statistically significant associations with different factors affecting children's BMI. In our study, no relationship was observed between BMI and the population density of the child living premises.

Conclusion: This study emphasizes the importance of gender, lifestyle, and socioeconomic status as major determinants of nutritional health among children in Assam. Such findings highlight the need for more targeted interventions that may help reduce such influence, hence improving child health in the region. The fact that living area density does not correlate with BMI suggests that future policy efforts may be made more useful when focusing on the quality of the socio-economic environment rather than on features of the physical location of living areas.