Abstract:
Malnutrition affects physical, mental and intellectual development as well as
the morbidity, mortality and physical work ability and the continued consequences
impact on human performance and survival. It is underlying causes resulted in many
diseases and death for the children under-five years of age. Factors are contributing to
the malnourished children are considered to many and varied.
The objective of the cross sectional study is to identify the sociocultural and
other factors associated with underweight children age under-five in Preah Vihear
province. Factors considered socio demographic characteristics of the mothers/closedcaregiver,
food relating factors, environment factors, household economic and health
status of mother and child. It was a cross sectional study using a modified
questionnaire from MICS 2006 and measure of weight and height.
Two hundred twenty households with children under-five from 3 sub-district
of Chhaeb, Preah Vihear participated in the study. SPSS (version 16) was used for data
analysis of frequency, percentage, mean, standard deviation and crosstabulation tested
by chi-square test. The result showed that the prevalence of underweight, stunting and
wasting children under-five years of age was 77.3%, 60.9% and 61.4%. Most of the
respondents were farmers (95.3%) and no education (33.6%) and completed primary
school (63.7%). From the statistical analysis using Chi-square; factors associate with
underweight children were level of mother’s education, number of times
feeding/breastfeeding, feeding child extra snacks, children ate carbohydrate, protein
food, vegetables/fruits, sweets (p<0.05). Moreover, the finding revealed that the
environment factors (child drinking water treatment) and child health factors (child
fever with cough) showed statistical significant with underweight children (p<0.05).
In term of food culture, beliefs and prejudice there were no statistical
significant different. However, over half the mothers/closed-caregivers thought that
child ate fish caused parasite and first breast milk caused child diarrhea or sickness due
to their food beliefs. For improving the child nutritional status, health and nutrition and
safe drinking water should be provided to the mothers.
