Abstract:
Background: During pregnancy a woman needs good nutrition for a healthy outcome.
Maternal nutrition plays a crucial role in influencing fetal growth and birth outcomes. Poor
birth outcomes such as high birth weight (HBW) and low birth weight (LBW) impose a huge
burden on families, the health care system, education, and social services. The association of
maternal dietary and nutritional characteristics on newborn birth weight is not studied in the
study area.
Objectives: To assess maternal dietary and nutritional characteristics as predictor of newborn
birth weight among pregnant mother who delivered in health institutions.
Method: Institution based cross sectional study was conducted among 541 pregnant mothers
who delivered in nine health institutions in Jimma Town from March 1 to April 30, 2017.
Data was entered into EPI data version 3.1 and analyzed using SPSS for windows, version
20.0; SPSS (Illinoise, Chicago,). Bivariate analysis was used to assess the association between
birth weight and list of independent variables and to test significance of the association at pvalue <0.25 for multivariable linear regression. Multivariable linear regression model was
used to identify the important predictors by controlling for possible confounding variables and
statistical significance was considered at p-value <0.05.
Results: Majority of newborns hadnormal birth weight (91.0%) with mean birth weight of
3224.6 ± 438.5 grams and only 2% of newborns had low birth weight. Maternal
undernutrition is observed in 46.5% defined as Mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) of <
23 cm. In Multivariable linear regression analyses it was observed that for a centimeter
increase in maternal MUAC, birth weight increased by 13.5 grams (β=13.5, P=0.04), with
each increase in parity of the mother, birth weight increased by 96.81 grams (β= 96.81,
P=0.01) and for a unit increase in wealth index birth weight increased by 49 grams (β=49.04,
P=0.01).
Conclusion and recommendations: - The predictors of newborn birth weight were maternal
MUAC, parity and wealth index. Improving the nutritional status of pregnant mothers through
nutrition counseling at antenatal care at all levels and improving socio-economic status by
creating access to micro financing is essential for both maternal and newborn health.
