Z Score and CIAF – A comprehensive measure of magnitude of undernutrition in a rural school going population of Kashmir, India

WHO has recently recommended the use of Z-Score or SD system to grade undernutrition as this system allows us to measure all the three indices i.e. weight for age, height for age, weight for height. 438 school children in the age group of 5-9 years were clinically and anthropometrically assessed in order to estimate the prevalence of undernutrition using the Z-Score system of classification and the recently introduced Composite Index of Anthropometric Failure (CIAF) .Only 112 (25.58%) of these children were in a state of anthropometric failure as per the Z-Score system , 10.73% of them being underweight , 15.29% wasted and 8.90% stunted. The most common anthropometric failure in these children was wasting while 30.35% of these undernourished children had more than one anthropometric failure.Using underweight as the sole criteria for assessing the magnitude of undernutrition in this study would give us an underestimate and we would miss about 58% of the undernourished children in our study population.