Zeitschrift für Probiotika und Gesundheit
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Abstrakt

Determinants of Low Birth Weight in Dire-Dawa City Public Health Facility Eastern Ethiopia

Mustaf Mahdi Badal

Background: Low Birth Weight (LBW) is one of the leading public health problems in developing countries including Ethiopia. Worldwide, more than 20 million infants born low birth weight every year. Of which about 13% to 15% occur in Sub-Saharan Africa. Thus, knowing clear picture of the risk factors of LBW in the study area is
essential. Therefore, this study was conducted to identify determinants of LBW in all public health facilities in dire dawa city administration eastern Ethiopia.
Methods: Unmatched case-control study was employed from 1 June to 1 August the data were collected using structured and pretested interviewer administered questionnaire in all public health facilities in study areas. Consecutive sampling technique was used to select cases and controls respectively. Data were entered in to Epidata software in version 3:1 and exported to SPSS version 23. Variables having with P-Value<0.25 in the binary logistic regression were entered in to multivariate logistic regression model. Statistical significance was considered at P-Value<0.05.
Results: A total of 292 mothers with their respective newborns (73 cases and 219 controls) were included the study, mothers not having nutritional counseling (AOR=3.13, 1.59--6.16), not consuming additional meal (AOR=2.37, 1.26--4.44), not having iron supplementation (AOR=2.21, 1.14--4.29), mothers being anemic (AOR=3.51, 1.64--7.53),
and undernourished mothers (AOR=4.83, 2.49--9.38) were significantly associated with the low birth weight in this study.
Conclusion: Poor nutrition related activities interims of nutritional counseling, iron supplementation, maternal feeding especially during pregnancy and others were the main problems identified in this study. Therefore, Government and non-governmental NGOs would work together to reduce LBW by establishing appropriate intervention, awareness creation and Behaviors Change Communication (BCC) and development of effective strategy and policy to improve maternal nutritional status and prevent maternal anemia are curtail. In addition, a large scale studies with strong study design like cohort and experimental needs to be conducted.