Publication: Infant feeding practices of mothers in an urban area in Nepal
Date
2007
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Kathmandu University
Abstract
Background: Child health in developing countries including Nepal is a matter of serious concern as the prevalence
of malnutrition among children continues to be high with 48.6% of children under five in Nepal being underweight.
Since infant feeding practices adopted by mothers play a major role in influencing health of these children, there is a
need to study the infant feeding practices prevalent in different areas in order to have pragmatic approaches to solve
this problem.
Materials and methods: A cross sectional study was conducted among mothers who attended the immunization
clinics of 18 wards of Pokhara municipality area. They were interviewed with a semi-structured questionnaire on
various aspects of infant feeding.
Result: A total of 168 mothers were interviewed and prevalence of breastfeeding was 99.4% (167). Only 43.5% of
the mothers initiated breastfeeding within one hour of birth and 60.5% were practicing exclusive breastfeeding at 5
months. Almost 40% of the mothers started complementary feeding before the recommended age of 6 months and
22.5 % delayed introduction of complementary feeding beyond the recommended age.
Conclusion: Breast feeding practices adopted by mothers of Pokhara urban area are still lacking in terms of late
initiation of and early starting of complementary feeding. There is a need to educate the mothers regarding proper
infant feeding practices.
Key words: infant feeding, breastfeeding, weaning
Description
Subba SH 1, TS Chandrashekhar2, Binu VS 3, Joshi HS 4, Rana MS 5, Dixit SB61 Associate Professor, 2, 4Assistant Professor 3 Assistant Professor of Biostatistics ,5Lecturer, 6Professor and HeadDepartment of Community Medicine, Manipal College of Medical Sciences, Pokhara, Nepal