The authors reply

摘要

We greatly appreciate the interest shown in our article by Dr. Prashanth and acknowledge that the comments have stimulated a lot of thought process on the subject of malnutrition and its indices, which is a very crucial issue in developing economies. It is well known that there exists a considerable amount of disagreement and overlap among various anthropometric indices while classifying nutritional status of a child. Different indicators have placed the same population of children in different grades of malnutrition suggesting that each variable measures different aspects of nutritional status (1). Therefore, a single variable cannot be effectively used to diagnose malnutrition under all circumstances. At the same time, the incorporation of all variables simultaneously to label a certain group as malnourished is impractical. This is precisely the reason why the most commonly used variable, i.e., weight for age (WFA) was used in this study to classify nutritional status.