MUAC Community Website

The attached document shows how to make an "equal pull" MUAC strap from Brixton Health / VALID International Ltd. (and other) design MUAC straps using very cheap and readily available materials (i.e. an elastic band, a staple, and a ball-point pen - you will also need a marker pen for other designs).

The attached study entitled Review of Nutrition and Mortality Indicators for the IPC - Reference Levels and Decision-making was commissioned by the SCN Task Force on Assessment, Monitoring and Evaluation (TF/AME) and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Global Partnership.

Here is an official guideline from the United Nations Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN) on the assessment of the nutritional status of adults in emergency-affected populations. This guidelines reviews the use of BMI, MUAC, clinical, and mixed indicator methods.

Here is an article on the use of arm muscle indicators to predict creatinine excretion in children. An interesting finding is that arm muscle measured my MUAC, or MUAC and triceps skin-fold, provides a useful index of body muscle in children.

Here is an article reviewing the role of muscle in health and disease (MUAC is a direct measure of muscle).

The Task Force on Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation of the United Nations System Standing committee on Nutrition has released a fact sheet on MUAC which you can download here.

MUAC straps of the numberless / colour-banded design are available from Valid International Ltd. and can be delivered by courier directly to UNO, NGO, and MoH country offices.

Here are a report and an associated presentation on the use of MUAC and W/H (using the NCHS reference and the WHO standard) for surveys estimating the prevalence of acute undernutrition and for program admission. Both were produced by Save the Children (UK) under an agreement with UNICEF on behalf of the IASC Global Nutrition Cluster.

Here is a presentations from the 2008 Washington CMAM conference regarding the use of MUAC as a monitoring and discharge criteria in CTC (CMAM) programs.