Maternal mental health and child nutritional status in an urban slum community in Bangladesh

Abstract

Objective: Maternal poor mental health might diminish her capability of taking adequate care of her child, resulting in negative impact on child’s nutrition. This study aims to determine the association between maternal mental health and child nutritional status.Methods: It was a cross-sectional study carried out in 264 mother-child pairs in an urban slum area of Bangladesh. Self-Reporting Questionnaire-20 (SRQ-20) was used for assessing maternal mental health. SRQ-20 score ≥7 was considered as common mental disorders (CMD). Anthropometric measurements were done for assessing child nutritional status. Results: The prevalence of maternal CMD was 46.2%. Maternal CMD was associated with poorer child feeding practice (p<0.001), poorer hygiene practice (p<0.001), poorer preventive care service use (p=0.016) and suffering from diarrheal disease (p=0.049). The prevalence of stunting, wasting and underweight were 44.3%, 18.2% and 33.7%, respectively. Poorer child feeding practice was associated with wasting (p=0.004) and underweight (p<0.001) but not with stunting. Poorer hygiene practice and suffering from diarrheal disease were associated with stunting and underweight but not with wasting. In multivariate analysis, maternal CMD was associated with child underweight (adjusted OR=2.25, 95% CI=1.15-4.43). Association between maternal CMD and wasting found in bivariate analysis that disappeared after multivariate analysis. No association was observed between maternal CMD and stunting in this study.Conclusions: Maternal mental health affects child nutritional status through child feeding practice, hygiene practice and preventive care use. Interventions to address mental health of mothers in child nutrition programmes might contribute to improve child nutritional status.