Nutritional Status and Its Associated Factors among School Adolescent Girls in Adama City, Central Ethiopia

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