Stunting: past, present, future

Child malnutrition is a very important global health challenge. 155 million children globally suffer from malnutrition and are consequently stunted, much shorter than healthy children at the same age. Reducing stunting was an important target in the Millenium Development Goals and is also a target under Goal 2 of the Sustainable Development Goals. This report summarises recent research on child stunting that was presented and discussed at a conference, STUNTING: PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE, at the London School of Economics and Political Science in September 2017. The conference brought together academics across a wide range of disciplines with policy experts and influencers from the third sector. There were four key lessons that participants took away from the conference. First, stunting was present in currently developed countries at the beginning of the twentieth century, which suggests that reductions in stunting were a corollary to the secular increase in mean adult height across the twentieth century. Second, there needs to be more research on catchup growth in adolescence to determine whether catch-up growth in height is also associated with improvements in other dimensions of health and human capital that are affected by malnutrition, for instance cognitive deficiencies. If interventions in adolescence can be effective, then it may be possible to mitigate some of the consequences of stunting for already stunted children. Third, researchers need to be aware of the large degree of spatial variation in stunting within countries and the distinct age pattern of stunting between ages 0 and 5 when trying to understand why children become stunted. Fourth, participants agreed that more interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary to design experiments and models to capture the multi-dimensional nature of child stunting.