An assessment of the association between antenatal care and child malnutrition in Bangladesh

Background
Child malnutrition in third-world countries is linked with a number of factors, including antenatal care services.

Objectives
This study attempts to examine the association between antenatal care services and child malnutrition in Bangladesh through analyzing the data set extracted from the nationally renowned Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey (BDHS) 2014.

Material and methods
The information was collected from ever married women who were 15 to 49 years of age. The total number of observations was 6,965, and the response variable of our study, child’s nutritional status (severely malnourished, moderately malnourished, nourished), was created by calculating the Z score for the anthropometric index weight-for-age. We conducted a chi-square test of independence to identify the association between selected covariates and the nutritional status of children and applied the cumulative logit model to assess the marginal effect of antenatal care services on child malnutrition.

Results
The results show that children whose mothers received antenatal care (ANC) from skilled ANC providers had a reduced risk of falling into the malnourished category of nutritional status when we considered only two variables (ANC visit and ANC provider) as covariates. Although the variable ANC visit was found significant (OR = 0.815, 95% CI = 0.665, 0.972) after controlling demographic and clinical covariates, the variable ANC provider appeared insignificant (OR = 1.025, 95% CI = 0.880, 1.225) in affecting child malnutrition.

Conclusions
The study concludes that an antenatal care visit has a significant association with child malnutrition. Thus, antenatal care visits could be beneficial in minimizing child malnutrition in Bangladesh.