Browsing by Author "Brown, Garielle"

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    Exploring the Relationship Between Intestinal Permeability and Growth in Children Under 2 Years of Age in Rural Nicaragua
    (2017) Brown, Garielle; Wilson, Warren; Meddings, Jonathan; Katzenberg, Anne
    Malnutrition and its sequelae have been implicated in up to 56% of childhood deaths in low and middle income countries, with 83% of those deaths attributable to mild or moderate rather than severe malnutrition. Recently, poor intestinal function has been implicated as a causational factor in up to 40% of childhood malnutrition. Biological anthropology, the study of human biological and behavioural variation, allows for the acquisition of detailed, contextualized data to elucidate the factors influencing health and facilitate the creation of culturally appropriate and effective interventions. Nicaragua is ranked 124 of 187 countries by the UN Human Development Report, and the Jinotega region is one of the poorest with the worst maternal and child health outcomes. This research aims to describe nutritional status and intestinal function, and evaluate the hypothesis that poor intestinal function correlates with poor nutritional status in children under two years of age in Los Robles, Nicaragua.
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    Relationship between food security and dietary diversity in Nicaraguan households
    (2022-03-23) McClennon, Steph; Piperata, Barbara A; Schmeer, Kammi K; Hoehn, Natasha; Brown, Garielle; Kushlyk, Kristan; Wilson, Warren M
    In 2020, nearly one-in-three people globally lacked access to adequate food; that is, they were food insecure. Food insecurity (FI) has four dimensions – availability, access, utilization, and stability – and is linked to poor health outcomes. Our understanding of the relationship between FI and health, however, is compromised by the fact that most research on FI focuses on the access dimension. This has resulted in a poor understanding of the utilization dimension; that is, how people cope with inadequate access to food as manifest by food choice. Here, we explore the relationship between maternal perceptions of food access and food choice, measured as dietary diversity, in 706 Nicaraguan households across urban, peri-urban and rural settings, and hypothesize that as food access worsens, dietary diversity will decline. Access was measured using the Latin American and Caribbean Food Security Scale. Dietary data were collected via a locally-developed, 7-day food-frequency questionnaire and converted to a household dietary diversity score (HDDS). The relationship was analyzed via multiple regression and ANOVA. We found that 82% of households experienced insufficient access to food and had a mean HDDS=10.9±1.2 out of a maximum score of 12. As access to food worsened, dietary diversity declined (r2=0.15, p<0.001), and the effect of food access on HDDS varied across settings (F=3.53, p=0.02). While we found a relationship between food access and HDDS, the high prevalence of insufficient access to food combined with a high average HDDS suggests that HDDS is too blunt an instrument to capture the lived experience.