Association between maternal literacy and their school-aged children's nutritional status in migrants with low socio-economic status in Tabriz, Iran

Background: Under-nutrition is still a major health problem especially in rural and deprived areas. There are doubts if the world is on the right track to reach MDG1 by 2015. There are evidence which claims that without focusing on poor areas and finding the socio-economic factors behind this problem it is unlikely to meet national and international nutrition goals. In previous surveys done in Iran the statistics from villages and poorer areas were different from the whole picture of the country. Methods: Using the whole census of the Eram zone in Tabriz/Iran in November 2010, 649 children in first grade elementary school were chosen. Questionnaires were sent to parents after pilot survey. Children's' weight and height was measured by standards measuring tools and written down in the anonymous form they brought back. 22 of students were taken out of analysis because of exclusion criteria. EpiInfo and WHOAnthroPlus were used to calculate children's' z-scores for their age for outcome nutritional values. W/A, H/A, W/H and BMI/A were used as outcomes. All the analysis was done by SPSS 17. Results: Of 627 participants in this study 5.3% were underweight, 2.2% stunted, 15.6% wasted and 26.6% had low BMI for their age. There was no association seen between nutritional status indicator and maternal literacy. None of the other confounding factors like paternal educational level, parents' occupation, their familial relation before marriage, child's sex, income per capita per day, years of migration to Tabriz, family size, birth rank of the child in the family showed any significant relation with nutritional outcomes. (p> 0.05) Conclusion: High prevalence of wasted children and low BMI for age of about one fourth of this population is a warning alarm for health authorities to seek for its underlying reasons and act immediately to solve them in order to prevent long term individual and social negative consequences. More studies are needed for this age group and regional data in Iran.