An unacceptably high burden of anaemia and it's predictors among young women (15-24 years) in low and middle income countries; set back to SDG progress

Anaemia is a major global public health problem, considerably affects young women in resource limited countries. The available researches on anaemia focused on children, pregnant women, or all women of reproductive age. However, women's biology and life experiences vary dramatically across 15 to 49 years, putting young women bear the higher burden of anaemia, mainly in low and middle income countries (LMICs). Therefore, this study assessed the burden of anaemia among young women (15-24 years) in 24 LMICs which conducted Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) between 2016 and 2021. Data analysis was carried out with STATA version 14. The forest plot was used to explore the pooled prevalence of anaemia. Multilevel binary logistic regression was fitted to accommodate the hierarchical nature of the DHS data. Accordingly, a model with lowest deviance (model III) was the best-fitted model. All variables with a p-value ≤ 0.2 in the bi-variable analysis were fitted in the multi-level multivariable model. Adjusted odds ratio with 95% CI and p