Tessema M. auteur aut IRD Laillou A. auteur aut IRD Tefera A. auteur aut IRD Teklu Y. auteur aut IRD Berger Jacques auteur aut IRD Wieringa Franck auteur aut IRD text journalArticle eng text/pdf reformatted digital access Early identification of children < 5 years with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) is a high priority to reduce child mortality and improved health outcomes. Current WHO guidelines for community screening for SAM recommend a Mid-Upper-Arm Circumference (MUAC) of less than 115 mm to identify children with SAM, but this cut-off does not identify a significant number of children with a weight-for-height Z-score <-3. To establish new specific MUAC cut-offs, pooled data was obtained for 25,755 children from 49 SMART recent surveys in Ethiopia (2016-2019). Sensitivity, proportion of false positive, and areas under receiver-operator characteristic curves (AUC) were calculated. MUAC below 115mm alone identified 55% of children with SAM identified with both methodologies. MUAC was worse in identifying older children (21%), those from a pastoral region (42%) and boys (41%). Using current WHO cut-offs, the sensitivity (Se) of MUAC below 115mm to identify the children severly malnourished screened through Weight-for- height below-3 was 16%. Analysing the ROC curve and Youden Index, Se and Specificity (Sp) were maximal at a MUAC < 133 mm cut-off to identify SAM (respectively Se 61.1%, Sp 81.4%). However, given the high proportion of false-positive children, according to gender, region and age groups, a cut-off around 125 mm to screen SAM could be the optimal one. In Ethiopia, implementation of a MUAC-only screening program for the identification of severe acute malnutrition with the actual cut-off of 115 mm would be unethical as it will lead to many children remaining undiagnosed and untreated. In addition, future study on implementation challenge on screening children with a higher cut-off or gender/age sensitive ones should be assessed with the collection of mortality and morbidity data to ensure that the most in need are being taking care of. specialized ETHIOPIE 054 15 4 e0230502 [11p.] 2020 1932-6203 https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010079132 10.1371/journal.pone.0230502 1932-6203 [F B010079132] https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010079132 https://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/divers20-07/010079132.pdf IRD - Base Horizon / Pleins textes 2020-07-31 2020-07-31 fdi:010079132 fre