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In rural Gambia, do adolescents have increased nutritional vulnerability compared with adults?

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posted on 2017-12-11, 14:12 authored by Simon M. Schoenbuchner, Sophie E. Moore, Will JohnsonWill Johnson, Mohammed Ngum, Bakary Sonko, Ann Prentice, A.M. Prentice, K.A. Ward
Adolescents may be particularly susceptible to malnutrition due to the energy and nutrient costs of the pubertal growth spurt. The aim of this study was to compare differences in selected markers of nutritional status between adolescents and adults in rural Gambia. The Keneba Biobank collects cross-sectional data and samples for all consenting individuals resident in the West Kiang region of The Gambia. For this study, participants between the ages of 10 and 40 years (y) were selected (n = 4201, female 2447). Height, body mass index, body composition, haemoglobin concentration, fasting glucose concentration and blood pressure were compared using linear regression models adjusting for age, parity, season of measurement and residence, across three age groups: early adolescent (10-14.9y), late adolescent (15-19.9y) and adult (20-39.9y). Adolescents, particularly early adolescent girls and boys, were shorter, lighter and leaner than adults. By late adolescence differences were smaller, particularly in girls where, notably, the prevalence of overweight, anaemia, hypertension and impaired fasting glucose was low. Given the importance of maternal health for reproductive outcomes and intergenerational health, the results of the study, albeit with limited biomarkers available, indicate adolescent girls are no more compromised than adult women or males from the same population.

Funding

This work was supported by a Collaborative Research Initiative grant from the Sackler Institute for Nutrition Science. The research was also supported through by the UK MRC and the Department for International Development (DFID) under the MRC/DFID Concordat agreement (U105960371, U123261351, MC-A760-5QX00, MC_UP_1005/1).

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Citation

SCHOENBUCHNER, S.M. ...et al., 2018. In rural Gambia, do adolescents have increased nutritional vulnerability compared with adults? Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1416(1), pp. 77-85.

Publisher

Wiley

Version

  • NA (Not Applicable or Unknown)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-12-05

Publication date

2018-03-25

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Wiley under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

0077-8923

Language

  • en

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