Undernutrition and its association with infant and young child feeding index among 6 to 23 months in demba gofa district, southern Ethiopia

Abstract

Back ground: Childhood malnutrition in a common nutritional problem in Ethiopia. Infant and Young child feeding practices remain a common problem in our country. Infant and young child practices are multidimensional and changes rapidly. The previously developed indicators could not be able to show the symultaneous effect of different dimension of complementary feeding and has focused on single practices over a narrow age range and has not addressed the impact of adequate or optimal infant and child feeding. Recently, infant and child feeding practices have received increasing attention and further been assessed with the use of a summary index as shown in several studies. However, most studies that assessed the feeding practices and their association with child nutrition and health outcome focused on one of the aspects of feeding in Ethiopia. Objective: To assess nutritional status and its association with infant and young child feeding summary index among 6-23 months age children in Demba Gofa District, SNNPR, Ethiopia Method: A community-based cross-sectional study design with multistage simple random sampling technique was conducted from March to May 2016 in Demba Gofa District, Southern Ethiopia. The data were collected from 696 randomly selected child-mother pairs. Weight and length of the children were measured and the nutritional status was assessed. Chi-square tests for trends and binary logistic regression for bivariate analysis and multiple logistic regression were used for multivariate analysis to identify the association between nutritional status and infant and child feeding index terciles. . Results: The analyses revealed that 43.8% (40.13-47.5), 15.8% (13.1-18.5) and 3.5% (2.1-4.8) 95% CI percent of children were stunted, underweight and wasted respectively. Two hundred eight (29.9%) infants and young children fell in the poor ICFI category and 276 (39.9%) were fell in to high feeding index category. After controlled for potential confounders, Low feeding index tercile was positively and significantly associated with stunting and underweight respectively whereas high feeding index tercile was negatively and significantly associated with stunting and underweight respectively as compared to medium feeding index tercile. Children who belonged to poor feeding practice 2.4 times (AOR = 2.4 (95 % CI: 1.39-4.2) more likely to be underweight whereas children who belonged to good child feeding practice 55% (AOR = 0.45 (95 % CI: 0.27-0.75) less likely to be stunted as compared to children who belonged to medium child feeding practices. Conclusion: The prevalence of undernutrion particularly stunting was high and child feeding practices were not optimal. Decreasing of infant and child feeding index score and increasing of stunting, underweight and wasting prevalence when the age of children increased were observed in this study reflected that infant and child feeding practices were not age appropriate and low attention have been given when the age of children increased. Recommendations: Health workers and health extension workers should educate mothers on complementary feeding by emphasizing the importance of increasing consistency and variety of food, increasing meal frequency when the age of child increased