Stunting incident prevention: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Introduction: Stunting incident prevention is important to ensure the quality of the future generation. With excellent future generations, Indonesia can compete with other nations and survive future challenges. Unfortunately, some provinces in Indonesia still had high stunting incident prevalence. The aim of this study is to provide information about the influential contributors of stunting incidents qualitatively and quantitatively and to provide recommendations for stunting incident prevention.

Materials and Methods: The researchers applied for a systematic literature review with a modified PRISMA procedure. The third criterion was that the articles had to be non-systematic literature review articles, published from 2017 until 2022.

Results: This process eventually led to 20 relevant articles: 15 quantitative articles and 3 qualitative articles. From the reviewed quantitative and qualitative research articles, the researchers found twelve influential factors of stunting incidents. Among these twelve factors, the reviewing results found two top factors with OR values more than 12 times. They were family income, the number of children and the ages of the children.

Conclusions: The researchers found that the most prominent factors of stunting incidents during the observations in qualitative research were parent education, early marriage, dietary system, economic and social status. Although statistically, the top influential factors were family income and the number of children, and ages of children, the minor contributors must be considered. On the other hand, the efforts to improve parent education require interventions from the government.