Work by the Risk Factors research team plays an essential role in IHME’s ground-breaking Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010 and our work in health information systems. To better measure global health, IHME researchers generate systematic estimates of risk factors. The research team's work will inform policymakers and researchers on the prevalence of risk factors in a population. With this information, targeted interventions can be created to address a population’s most pressing health issues.
Key Activities
- Perform risk factor analyses
Malnutrition in children under age 5 is a known risk factor for many childhood diseases and causes of death, such as diarrhea, recurrent infections, meningitis, and pneumonia. Despite the well-understood poor outcomes of undernourishment, reducing child malnutrition has remained a global challenge, particularly for developing countries. Underscoring the importance of this health condition, Target 1C of the first Millennium Development Goal is to “Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger,” which is measured by the prevalence of underweight children under the age of 5. The prevalence of under-5 malnutrition has decreased significantly since 1970. However, important disparities between regions and countries still exist.
As part of our work to measure risk factors that affect population health, IHME researchers generated a time series of under-5 moderate-to-severe underweight (weight-for-age below -2SD) prevalence estimates for all countries, from 1970 to 2015. We constructed a database of 1,743 childhood underweight data points from microdata and tabulated reports. We developed a methodology to crosswalk between estimates calculated using the 1978 National Center for Health Statistics/World Health Organization (WHO) Growth Standard and the 2006 WHO Child Growth Standards. Using income, caloric intake, and maternal education as covariates, we employed spatio-temporal regression methods to generate a full malnutrition time series.
The research team plans to conduct analyses of alcohol consumption, diet, and tobacco use in the future.
Impact
Work by the Risk Factors research team will inform policymakers and researchers on the prevalence of risk factors in a population. With this information, targeted interventions can be created to address a population’s most pressing health issues.
