NUTRITIONAL SOFTWARE AND APPLICATIONS

PREAMBLE Physical nutritional assessment

&Laboratory analysisTraditionally, nutritional assessment was

done manually by physical assessment, Data analysis was also done by calculating variables manually

food companies would send food samples to laboratories for chemical testing. Chemical testing involves the incineration of the foods to test the ash for exact nutritional content.

Nutritional SoftwareNutritional SoftwareSoftware are available as alternative to laboratory

nutrition analysis and physical nutritional assessment. They provide quick computations of nutritional assessment variable. Other software utilizes a database of ingredients that have previously been laboratory tested.

The user can input ingredient data by matching their ingredients to ingredients found in the database; the analysis can then be calculated.

In case of anthropometric assessment the user can compute the required data and nutritional status of an individual or groups will be indicated by the specific software program

Example of nutritional software are; WHO-anthro, WHOanthro plus, Nutri-survey, Ena, Epi-INFO, SMART etc

ENAWhat does ENA stand for?The acronym ‘ENA’ stands for Emergency

Nutrition Assessment. The original name of the software associated to the SMART initiative was ‘Nutrisurvey’ but the name was subsequently changed to ENA to differentiate it better from the general nutrition software called NutriSurvey.

The purpose of ENA for SMART is to make nutrition assessments and mortality rate calculations in emergency situations as easy and reliable as possible. To achieve this it focuses on the most important indicators (anthropometric and mortality data)

ENA cont…..

Epi InfoEpi Info is a public domain statistical software for

epidemiology which has been developed by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Epi Info allows epidemiologists and other public health and medical professionals to easily and quickly develop a questionnaire or form, customize the data entry process, check the survey data for outliers and inconsistent data, conduct a descriptive analysis of survey data, and easily generate output files from the analysis.

The program allows for electronic survey creation, data entry, and analysis. Within the analysis module, analytic routines include t-tests, ANOVA, nonparametric statistics, cross tabulations and stratification with estimates of odds ratios, risk ratios, and risk differences, logistic regression (conditional and unconditional), survival analysis and analysis of complex survey data.

Epi Info

WHO Anthro & WHO Anthro plusOn the use of the WHO Anthro: Software for

assessing growth and development of the world's children(0-5)yrs. The software consists of three modules:

Anthropometric calculatorIndividual assessmentNutritional survey

WHO anthroPlusWHO anthroplus is the same as WHO anthro except in the age

categories.

WHO AnthroPlus is a software for the global application of the WHO Reference 2007 for 5-19 years to monitor the growth of school-age children and adolescents. To show the continuity with the WHO Child Growth Standards for 0-5 years these are included in AnthroPlus for the three indicators that apply. 

The software opens by default in English but can be changed to run in French, Spanish and Russian. It consists of the following modules:

- Anthropometric calculator- Individual assessment- Nutritional survey

Anthroprometric calculatorIt consists ofHeight for age,-stand for stuntingWeight for age-stand for wastingBMI for age-stand forComputed in terms of percentile, and analyzed

in terms of Z score

Macros for the statistical software packages SPSS, SAS, S-Plus and STATA to facilitate survey data analysis.

All four macros, i.e. the SAS, S-Plus, SPSS and STATA macro calculate the indicators of the attained growth standards (length/height-for-age, weight-for-age, weight-for-length, weight-for-height, body mass index-for-age, head circumference-for-age, arm circumference-for-age, triceps skinfold-for-age and subscapular skinfold-for-age).

Macros ….SAS  (Statistical Analysis System) is an

integrated system of software products provided by SAS Institute Inc.. that enables programmers to perform:

Report writing and graphicsQuality improvementStatistical analysisBusiness planning and fore castingProject management

Macros….Stata is a general-purpose statistical software package

created in 1985 by StataCorp. It is used by many businesses and academic institutions around the world. Most of its users work in research, especially in the fields of economics, sociology, political science, biomedicine andepidemiology

Stata's capabilities includes data management, statistical analysis, graphics, simulations, and custom programming.

S-PLUS is a commercial implementation of the S programming language sold by TIBCO Software Inc..

It features object-oriented programming capabilities and advanced analytical algorithms.

Macros…SPSS, refer back to spss features and

applications

Z-scoreIn statistics, a standard score indicates how

many standard deviations an observation or datum is above or below the mean.

Z-score…

The WHO Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition uses a Z-score cut-off point of <-2 SD to classify low weight-for-age, low height-for-age and low weight-for-height as moderate and severe under nutrition, and <-3 SD to define severe under nutrition. The cut-off point of >+2 SD classifies high weight-for-height as overweight in children.

clinicians or researchers can assess the child’s growth and general nutritional status by using a standardized age- and sex-specific growth reference to calculate height-for-age Z-scores (HAZ), weight-for-age Z-scores (WAZ), weight-for-height Z-scores (WHZ) and body-mass-index-for-age Z-scores (BAZ).

The Z-score system expresses anthropometric values as several standard deviations (SDs) below or above the reference mean or median value. Because theZ-score scale is linear, summary statistics such as means, SDs and standard errors can be computed from Z-score values. Z-score summary statistics are also helpful for grouping growth data by age and sex