Prevalence of Helminthiasis Among Anemic Children

Abstract

The rate of anemic patients is high, with 42 percent of children under five suffering from anemia. Understanding the root cause of anemia in children would help to determine the appropriate treatment to prevent/minimize the effect of anemia, such as stunting, poor school performance, and problems in growth. One of the common causes of anemia in children is helminthiasis, an infection by parasitic worms that can infect children exposed to helminths, which can cause anemia by causing persistent intestinal blood loss, which causes iron deficiency. The screening for a systematic review aims to determine the prevalence of helminthiasis on anemic children and the relationship between anemia and helminth infection.The data was collected from PubMed and was moved into a screening tool. The hits were screened, and Rayyan, Zotero was used to select the data. The data were extracted from the articles that have detailed data about the anemic children that have helminthiasis. Review Manager was used to creating meta-analysis data. the result of the data searching from PubMed is 2599 hits in total and 711 hits after removing the duplicate articles. Twenty-three articles had quantitative data of helminth infections among anemia patients and were included in the final analysis.The conclusion is the anemic children indeed are most of them caused by the helminth.