Nutritional Status of Children Under 5 by Sex

Data as of 2019

Distribution of weight-for-age (WAZ), height-for-age (HAZ), and weight-for-height (WHZ) scores for children under 5 years old based on WHO standards, which are used to assess malnutrition (underweight, stunting, wasting, and obesity).

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How is this data produced?

This data is tabulated based on survey records collected via the National Health and Morbidity Survey (NHMS), which is conducted by the Ministry of Health once every 4 years. The NHMS is design to collect representative data on various healthcare outcomes, especially those which cannot be assessed through administrative hospital data. For a fuller description of the methodology, please refer to the NHMS 2019 report.

For this dataset specifically, the distributions of WAZ, HAZ and WHZ for Malaysia were calculated by comparing the weights and heights of children under 5 years old to the World Health Organization Growth Standard 2006 (WHO 2006). Following that, the prevalence of 4 key malnutrition indicators is defined as follows:

  • Underweight: Weight-for-age (WAZ) less than 2 standard deviations below the median
  • Stunting: Height-for-age (HAZ) less than 2 standard deviations below the median
  • Wasting: Weight-for-height (WHZ) less than 2 standard deviations below the median
  • Obesity: Weight-for-height (WHZ) more than 2 standard deviations above the median

What caveats I should bear in mind when using this data?

These figures are based on the 2019 NHMS. Changes due to the pandemic will only be reflected in data based on the 2023 NHMS.

Publication(s) using this data

Metadata

Dataset description

Distribution of weight-for-age (WAZ), height-for-age (HAZ), and weight-for-height (WHZ) scores for children under 5 years old based on WHO standards, which are used to assess malnutrition (underweight, stunting, wasting, and obesity).

Variable definitions
  • Date
  • Sex
  • Indicator
  • Range
  • Description
  • Prevalence (%)
Last updated:

01 Sept 2024, 12:00

Next update:

N/A

Data source(s)
  • MOH
License

This data is made open under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). A copy of the license is available Here.

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Data
Full Dataset (CSV)

Full Dataset (CSV)

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Full Dataset (Parquet)

Full Dataset (Parquet)

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Code

Connect directly to the data with Python.

# If not already installed, do: pip install pandas fastparquet import pandas as pd URL_DATA = 'https://storage.data.gov.my/healthcare/nutrition_status_u5_sex.parquet' df = pd.read_parquet(URL_DATA) if 'date' in df.columns: df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date']) print(df)

Sample OpenAPI query

The following code is an example of how to make an API query to retrieve the data catalogue mentioned above. You can use different programming languages by switching the code accordingly. For a complete guide on possible query parameters and syntax, please refer to the official Open API Documentation.

import requests import pprint url = "https://api.data.gov.my/data-catalogue?id=nutrition_children_sex&limit=3" response_json = requests.get(url=url).json() pprint.pprint(response_json)