Objective  To investigate influencing factors of nutritional anemia in Chinese children aged 0 – 6 years and to provide evidences for prevention and management of the disease.

  Methods  Studies published till December 31st 2015 on impact factors of nutritional anemia among 0 – 6 years old children in China were searched through Pubmed, China Biological Medicine (CBM), WanFang Database, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), and Chongqing VIP database (VIP). Stata 11.0 software was applied for the meta-analysis.

  Results  For the 15 included studies with totally 10 846 anemic children and 31 613 control children, the pooled odds ratio (OR) and its 95% confidence interval (95% CI) of the factors associated with anemia were 1.805 (1.251 – 2.603) for maternal anemia, 1.411 (1.123 – 1.772) for without timely introduction of solid food, 1.329 (1.179 – 1.498) for malnutrition, 1.798 (1.409 – 2.296) for suffering gastrointestinal disease recently, and 0.789 (0.717 – 0.867) for at elder age of month. No publication bias were observed for the studies based on sensitivity analysis and bias estimation, suggesting the results of the meta-analysis is valid.

  Conclusion  Elder age of month, maternal anemia, without timely introduction of solid food, malnutrition, suffering from gastrointestinal disease during recent time are the risk factors of nutritional anemia among 0 – 6 years old children in China.