Background: Underweight is nutritional status indicator of malnutrition (either acute or chronic malnutrition) based on the principle that child as on expected weight for his or her age. The purpose of this study is to investigate disease that affects underweight status of children.
Methods: The total population of this research was 2650children’s of under-five years old in Wolkite town. The study was conducted by using simple random sampling and the total sample size selected was 182 out of the total population. The research was conducted by using secondary data as a source. Which is from statistical document of Wolkite town health center? The data were analyzed by statistical software packages such as SPSS and using these packages descriptive, inferential statistics and binary logistic regression were analyzed.
Result: From the chi-square test, we found that children weight status is significantly associated with diarrhea, pneumonia, respiratory disease, skin infection disease and malaria. From logistic regression model result, children’s caught by diarrhea (OR=0.017), children’s caught by pneumonia (OR=0.131), children’s caught by respiratory disease (OR=0.118), children’s caught by skin infection (OR=0.100) and children’s caught by malaria (OR=0.122) are significantly contributed to children weight status.
Conclusion: The findings of this study show that the major diseases that affect underweight status of children were diarrhea, pneumonia, respiratory disease, skin infection disease and malaria. We recommended that the health office of Wolkite town to increase the number of clinics which is used to assets the children disease.
Children weight status; Chi-square; Logistic regression