| Overall impact: |  Limited |
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Impact: |
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Strength: |
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Rapid and effective treatment of illness minimizes the detrimental effect of illness on caloric intake. Among other things, this includes oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea, care seeking for pneumonia, and management of severe and moderate acute malnutrition.
Literature Review
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Impact: |
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Strength: |
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Management of severe and moderate acute malnutrition are included as proven nutrition-specific interventions within the Lancet nutrition series.
Quantitative Analysis
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Impact: |
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Strength: |
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Given the lack of an ecological proxy variable for complementary feeding, we were unable to evaluate it using linear mixed effects regression.
Care seeking for pneumonia was found to be significantly associated with stunting prevalence over the 2008-2016 period at the 10 percent significance level; the effect size of 0.03 was small. Oral rehydration therapy was not found to be significant. Without a good proxy for management of severe and moderate acute malnutrition, these treatments could not be analyzed in the context of Peru.
Under the decomposition analysis, neither care seeking for pneumonia nor ORT was found to be a significant predictor of HAZ-score.
Without a good proxy for management of severe and moderate acute malnutrition, these treatments were not able to be analyzed in the context of Peru.
Qualitative Analysis
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Impact: |
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Strength: |
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Not explicitly mentioned.
Conclusion
It is possible and biologically plausible that treatment of illness contributed to stunting reduction in Peru. However, treatment (versus prevention) was not highly prioritized by policymakers, and quantitative analysis yield mixed findings.