Perception of Mothers on Adequate Nutrition

Background: Malnutrition in children less than 5 years old persists around the world. In West Java and one of the districts of West Java (Sumedang), the prevalence of malnutrition is about 18.5% and 15.8% respectively.  Numerous factors can lead to child malnutrition. Difficulties in availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of food can be contributing factors. A good perception of mother on adequate nutrition can improve children’s nutritional status. This study was conducted to study the perception of mothers with children 2 to 5 years old on adequate nutrition. Methods: Most of the respondents had good perception on the aspect of adequate nutrition.  Results showed perception on availability was 83.8%, physical accessibility was 97.1%, economical accessibility was 98.6%, information accessibility was 84.8% and acceptability was 81.0%. However, perception of respondents on good quality nutrition for the main meal and additional food was still poor. Moreover, there are taboos for eating shrimp and watermelon. Additionally, children were given snacks in large amount.Results: There was a strong correlation between mid-upper arm muscle area/size and muscular strength (correlation cooefficient 0.746). Moreover, the higher the Body Mass Index, the stronger the muscle strength was to some point. If the BMI was more than 25 kg/m2, this findings did not occurred. Conclusions: This study reveals that the perception of mothers on good quality food is poor regardless the good results on availibility, accesibility and acceptability. [AMJ.2017;4(1):87–93] DOI: 10.15850/amj.v4n1.102

Breakfast Composition in Junior High School Students

Background: Adolescence is a time of rapid development that requires higher nutrient intake levels than in adulthood. However the habit of skipping breakfast has become very popular among adolescents. Skipping breakfast has negative effects such as difficulty in concentrating, growth impairment and decrease academic performance. Therefore, this study was conducted to identify the breakfast composisition of early adolescents in Jatinangor, Sumedang, Indonesia.Methods: A cross sectional study with non-probability sampling method, was conducted in a junior high school Jatinangor during the month of July 2013. Ninety six participants were included in this study. All the participants underwent an interview about the food intake for breakfast in seven days using eating pattern recall guidelines.Results: Overall, 37% of the respondents skipped breakfast. The mean of total calories among the adolescents who consumed breakfast was 286.06 (187.89) kcal. The amount of carbohydrate, fat and protein consumed was 29.23 (19.93) gram, 13.93 (13.29) gram and 8.78 (6.11) gram accordingly. The main reason for adolescent to skip breakfast was lack of time.Conclusions: Majority of the respondents have their  breakfast before they go to school. Overall, the total calories comsumed is sufficient however the amount of protein consumed is low. [AMJ.2015;2(4):525–8] DOI: 10.15850/amj.v2n4.63

Perception of Mothers on Adequate Nutrition

Background: Malnutrition in children less than 5 years old persists around the world. In West Java and one of the districts of West Java (Sumedang), the prevalence of malnutrition is about 18.5% and 15.8% respectively.  Numerous factors can lead to child malnutrition. Difficulties in availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality of food can be contributing factors. A good perception of mother on adequate nutrition can improve children’s nutritional status. This study was conducted to study the perception of mothers with children 2 to 5 years old on adequate nutrition. Methods: Most of the respondents had good perception on the aspect of adequate nutrition.  Results showed perception on availability was 83.8%, physical accessibility was 97.1%, economical accessibility was 98.6%, information accessibility was 84.8% and acceptability was 81.0%. However, perception of respondents on good quality nutrition for the main meal and additional food was still poor. Moreover, there are taboos for eating shrimp and watermelon. Additionally, children were given snacks in large amount.Results: There was a strong correlation between mid-upper arm muscle area/size and muscular strength (correlation cooefficient 0.746). Moreover, the higher the Body Mass Index, the stronger the muscle strength was to some point. If the BMI was more than 25 kg/m2, this findings did not occurred. Conclusions: This study reveals that the perception of mothers on good quality food is poor regardless the good results on availibility, accesibility and acceptability. [AMJ.2017;4(1):87–93] DOI: 10.15850/amj.v4n1.102

Correlation between Maternal Hemoglobin Level and Birth Weight

Background: Pregnant women are susceptible to have anemia, marked by hemoglobin level <11gr/dL. Maternal hemoglobin levels may influence the nutritional transfer, oxygenation, and uteroplacental circulation of the babies which may affect the infant’s birth weight. This study aimed to explore the correlation between hemoglobin level and birth weight in pregnant women in rural area in Bandung.Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted from August to September 2014, recruiting all pregnant women registered in a hospital in a rural areas Bandung. Hemoglobin level was obtained from the medical records and analyzed to correlate with birth weight (Pearson correlation).Results: In total, there were 95 pregnant women included. The mean of maternal hemoglobin level was 11.6±1.2gr/dL and birth weight was 2.927±398gram. The proportion of maternal anemia and low birth weights were 30.5% and 15.8%, respectively. Pearson correlation test showed r=-0.093 and p=0.369 which was not significant.Conclusions: There was no correlation between maternal hemoglobin level and birth weight. Other factors for low maternal hemoglobin need to be further explored.

Development of a nonlinear hierarchical model to describe the disposition of deuterium in mother-infant pairs to assess exclusive breastfeeding practice

The World Health Organization recommends exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) for the first 6 months after birth. The deuterium oxide dose-to-the-mother (DTM) technique is used to distinguish EBF based on a cut-off (&lt; 25 g/day) of water intake from sources other than breastmilk. This value is based on a theoretical threshold and has not been verified in field studies. The aim of this study was to estimate the water intake cut-off value that can be used to define EBF practice. One hundred and twenty-one healthy infants, aged 2.5-5.5 months who were deemed to be EBF were recruited. After administration of deuterium to the mothers, saliva was sampled from mother and infant pairs over a 14-day period. Validation of infant feeding practices was conducted via home observation over six non-consecutive days with caregiver recall. A fully Bayesian framework using a gradient-based Markov chain Monte Carlo approach implemented in Stan was used to estimate the cut-off of non-milk water intake of EBF infants. From the original data set, 113 infants were determined to be EBF and provided 1500 paired mother-infant observations. The deuterium saliva concentrations were best described by two linked 1-compartment models (mother and infant), with body weight as a covariate on the mother's volume of distribution and infant's body weight on infant's water clearance rate. The cut-off value was based on the 90th percentile of the posterior distribution of non-milk water intake and was 86.6 g/day. This cut-off value can be used in future field studies in other geographic regions to determine exclusivity of breast feeding practices in order to determine their potential public health needs

Development of a parsimonious design for optimal classification of exclusive breastfeeding

A deuterium oxide dose‐to‐mother (DTM) technique is used to determine if an infant is exclusive breastfeeding (EBF). However, the DTM method is intensive, requiring seven paired mother–infant samples during a 14‐day study period. The purpose of this study was to develop a field‐friendly protocol. Data from 790 mother–infant pairs from nine countries were analyzed using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method with Stan. The data were split into (i) model building (565 pairs) and (ii) design evaluation (225 pairs). EBF classification was based on a previously published cut‐off for nonmilk water intake. Classification based on the full design was the reference (gold standard classification). The receiver operating characteristics of parsimonious designs were used to determine an optimal parsimonious classification method. The best two postdose windows (days 7–9 and 13–14) yielded optimal categorization with similar performance in the design evaluation data. This postdose two‐sample design provided 95% sensitivity and specificity when compared with the full design

Preliminary Study: Glycemic Index of Brown and White Rice Variant IR64 in Healthy Adult Men

Objective: To measure the glycemic index of brown and white rice in healthy adult men. Methods: The study was conducted in April 2010 at Universitas Padjadjaran, Jatinangor. Subjects of 21 healthy male students were randomly divided into 3 groups, which were given white bread (WB), white rice (WR) and brown rice (BR). Results: The results show that the highest and lowest average values of the blood glucose response was in the WR group at 30 minutes (126.9 mg/dL) and at 120 minutes (87.4 mg/dL), respectively. The glycemic index of brown rice (97.28) was lower compared to the white rice (99.26). Conclusions: Both WR and BR are classified as high glycemic index food. The higher glycemic index of brown rice, compared to the index found in other literatures, may be caused by differences in variant and/or production process. This study suggested the importance of evaluation of local products before promoting it to the community.     Keywords: Blood glucose level, brown rice, glycemic index DOI: 10.15850/ijihs.v1n1.10

Building sustainable capacity for health research in africa through cloud computing applications

Access to information and continuous education represent critical factors for physicians and researchers over the world. For African professionals, this situation is even more problematic due to the frequently difficult access to technological infrastructures and basic information. Both education and information technologies (e.g., including hardware, software or networking) are expensive and unaffordable for many African professionals. Thus, the use of e-learning and an open approach to information exchange and software use have been already proposed to improve medical informatics issues in Africa. In this context, the AFRICA BUILD project, supported by the European Commission, aims to develop a virtual platform to provide access to a wide range of biomedical informatics and learning resources to professionals and researchers in Africa. A consortium of four African and four European partners work together in this initiative. In this framework, we have developed a prototype of a cloud-computing infrastructure to demonstrate, as a proof of concept, the feasibility of this approach. We have conducted the experiment in two different locations in Africa: Burundi and Egypt. As shown in this paper, technologies such as cloud computing and the use of open source medical software for a large range of case present significant challenges and opportunities for developing countries, such as many in Africa