Sonia Solano
Melissa King
Biological Anthropology
Academic Article Review Physical growth of children is widely recognized as one of the most sensitive and reliable indicator of health and nutritional status in the human population. Growth and maturation are maintained by the interactions of genes, hormones and nutrients, and it provides and indirect measurement of the quality of life of an entire population. Nutrition is the process by which living organisms receive and utilize the material necessary for the maintenance for their function as well as renewal of their functions. The assessment of the nutritional status of children is useful for understanding not only the health status of the community but also for the national and regional policy planning. One of the major health problems in many developing countries is malnutrition (undernutrition and overnutrition) which creates a lasting effect on the growth, development, and physical fitness of a person. Undernutrition is difficult to quantify, but its presence is ordinarily established in public health and clinical contexts with the use of anthropometry, specifically weight and height. Undernutrition during infancy and early childhood receives most emphasis because of its association with morbidity and mortality early in life and its long-term consequences; however, undernutrition can occur at any time during the life cycle. In developing countries, with India being one of them, the proportion of overweight and obese people now coexist with those who are undernourished. In the article that I chose, the author's main point was physical growth and nutritional status among Ao Naga Children of Nagaland, Northeast India. Like I did in my introduction, the author of the article described exactly what he was going to study. The author explained some terms that may have been misinterpreted by the readers beforehand or had a previous definition of what the word really meant The author also gave a background of where the location of his study was and what the people were like that he included in his study. The author gave some pretty solid information and facts about what it meant to be "malnourished" "obese" "overweight" and "undernourished" meant. The author of this article not only discussed about the physical condition of the children, but also of the diseases that they can carry from living in their environment. A cross-sectional investigation on 289 boys and 282 girls aged 8 to 15 years was carried out in Mokokchung town. Mokokchung is the home of the Ao Naga tribe. For the present study, the urban area in Mokokchung district was taken into consideration, out of which seven wards, namely, Salangtem, Sangtemla, Dilong, Kichutip, Artang, Aongza, and Kumlong were selected randomly using a lottery method as mentioned in Snedecor and Cochran. No statistical sampling of households and individuals was done for the purpose of the collection of data, instead an attempt was made to include all those children who were willing to cooperate for the purpose of the present study. Data on height and weight were collected using an anthropometric rod to the nearest 0.1 cm and weighing machine to the nearest 0.5 kg. The parameters taken were analyzed statistically to find out the mean and standard deviation. In order to test the level of significance, both t-test and chi-square test were used. body mass Index (BMI) was assessed computing the international cutoff points for children and adolescents according to age and sex as recommended by Cole et al.. A significance at 0.05 was used for all analyses employing MS office excel and SPSS 17 for windows software. The date of age of the children was collected from the parents taking into account the school records and birth certificate, if any. Decimal age of each subject was calculated by subtracting the date of birth of the subject from the date of data collection, using a decimal age calendar. All the subjects between 7.50 and 8.50 years