Assessment of Malnuorished Children under Plumpy Nut Clinical Trial

Abstract

The work assessed malnutrition cases and the effectiveness of plumpy nuts on the malnourished children within the Kassena- Nankana district in the Upper East Region of Ghana.Malnourished children under five years of age were followed for sixteen weeks during the period of years 2010 – 2014 in which the ready - to – use therapeutic food (RUTFs) “plumpy” nuts which contains calories and essential nutrients that restore, maintain body weight and health in severely malnourished were administered to the children depending on their admission weight until the target weight is obtained. The work resort to determine the effectiveness of plumpy nuts on the malnourished children and to come out with the best model to estimate the mean weight of malnuorised children under the influence of censored observations. The study revealed that, malnutrition rate among children in the Region has decreased for the last year of the selected period of study. This shows that the ready – to –use- therapeutic food (RUTFs) plumpy nuts was effective. It also revealed that, even though malnutrition cases were 20% higher in male children than female children, this shows that sex has an influence on the number of malnutrition cases. In this work Kaplan and Meier estimator was the appropriate model for estimating mean weight of the malnourished children

Keywords: Malnutrition, plumpy nuts, RUTFs, malnourished, weight.