Population Health Unit, Kenya Medical Research Institute-Wellcome Trust Research Programme, PO Box 43640-00100, Nairobi, Kenya.
Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford, OX3 7LG, Oxford, UK.
Trans R Soc Trop Med Hyg. 2020 Aug 1;114(8):627-631. doi: 10.1093/trstmh/traa032.
Anaemia has long been recognised as a major public health problem among young children in lower- and middle-income countries and is an indicator of both poor nutrition and health status. There has been little progress towards improvement of anaemia in part due to its complex aetiology. An added impediment to the progress is that the monitoring of anaemia does not routinely target the whole population, with school-aged children (SAC) largely overlooked.
We re-examined data on the prevalence of anaemia among children aged <15 y sampled from 2008-2015 in Kenya.
Approximately one in four Kenyan children aged <15 y were described as anaemic, including 12% with WHO-defined moderate anaemia and 1% who were severely anaemic. Average haemoglobin concentrations increased with age and the risk of having anaemia decreased with age. However, one in five SAC in Kenya were suffering from anaemia; most were either mild (11.4%) or moderately (10.9%) anaemic.
The monitoring of anaemia in SAC continues to be a neglected area limiting a careful articulation of the need to target interventions in this age group.
贫血一直被认为是中低收入国家幼儿的主要公共卫生问题，是营养不良和健康状况不佳的指标。由于其复杂的病因，在改善贫血方面几乎没有取得进展。监测贫血工作没有常规覆盖全体人群，而学龄儿童（SAC）在很大程度上被忽视，这是进展的一个额外障碍。
我们重新检查了 2008 年至 2015 年期间在肯尼亚抽取的 15 岁以下儿童贫血患病率的数据。
大约四分之一的肯尼亚 15 岁以下儿童被描述为贫血，其中 12%患有世界卫生组织定义的中度贫血，1%患有严重贫血。平均血红蛋白浓度随年龄增长而增加，贫血风险随年龄增长而降低。然而，肯尼亚五分之一的 SAC 患有贫血；大多数是轻度（11.4%）或中度（10.9%）贫血。
SAC 贫血监测仍然是一个被忽视的领域，限制了在这一年龄组有针对性地开展干预工作的必要性。
