Abstract:
Adolescence is a period of rapid growth and maturation in human development that demands extra nutrients and
energy to support growth. Focusing on adolescents’ nutrition, especially girls, provides a unique opportunity to break
the intergenerational cycles of malnutrition. But, there is little information about nutritional status of school going
adolescent girls in central Ethiopia.
Methods: Institutional based cross-sectional quantitative study was employed among school going adolescent
girls in Adama city. Survey was conducted among 726 samples which were selected by using stratified cluster
random sampling procedures. Data was entered into Epi Data and transferred to SPSS (version 16) for analysis.
WHO Anthro plus software was used to calculate body mass index for age z-score and height for age z-score.
Multivariable logistic regression was used to measure the association between the dependent variable and
independent variables with 95% confidence interval.
Results: This study found that 21.3% of adolescent girls were underweighted, 3.3% were overweight, 1.0% was
obese and 15.6% were stunted. Of the adolescents, 41.2% of them received minimum dietary diversity (MDD), but
73.0% of the underweighted adolescent’s did not receive minimum dietary diversity in 24 h before the survey. The
proportions of wasting, stunting and low dietary diversity were higher among subjects from government schools
compared to those from private schools. The predictors of under-nutrition among adolescent girls were: being born
from uneducated parents (father and mother), their fathers’ occupation of being a merchant, adolescents with low
dietary diversity, monotonous diet and adolescents attending government schools.
Conclusion: Malnutrition affects one out of five female adolescent in this community and was associated with
poor dietary dive
