Nutritional Status And Pneumonia in Children Under Five at Princess Marie Louise Children Hospitals

ABSTRACT 

Background: Pneumonia is a form of acute respiratory infection. The epidemiology of childhood pneumonia is due to various risk factors such as malnutrition, substandard breastfeeding, exposure to biomass fuel for cooking and parental smoking and needs further investigation. Objective: The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between pneumonia and nutritional status in children under five at Princess Marie Louise Children’s hospital. Method: An unmatched case-control design was conducted and 88 cases and 88 controls were consecutively sampled. Data was collected with semi-structured questionnaires and child anthropometry was taken. Data was entered and analysed in MS Excel 2016 software, WHO Anthro software version 3.2.2 and Stata software version 15. Chi square test and Wilcoxon rank sum test were used to test of association for categorical and continuous variables respectively. Logistic regression was run to assess the extent to which the significant independent categorical variables influenced pneumonia. All tests were two-sided and statistical significance was set at 0.05. Results: In the study, majority (80) of the cases were children between the ages 2 months to less than 60 months. The bivariate analysis showed that categorized child’s age, weaning age, main caretaker, religion, complementary feeding, source of drinking water, height-for-age z-score and weight-for-age z-score were statistically significant. Pneumonia had a positive effect among children who were stunted (aOR= 0.08, 95% CI: 0.01-0.89), not stunted (aOR= 0.10, 95% CI: 0.01-0.86) and who had a relative other than the mother as main caretaker (aOR= 0.19, 95% CI: 0.04-0.95) and were significantly associated with the disease. Furthermore, being a female child (aOR= 1.85, 95% CI 0.92- 3.72)., underweight (aOR= 5.17, 95% CI: 0.88-30.59), not underweight (aOR= 1.4, 95% CI: 0.32-6.14), not started complementary feeding yet (aOR=2.12, 95% CI: 0.37-12.02) and those who had started complementary feeding before 6 months (aOR= 1.61, 95% CI: 0.77-3.38) had higher odds of getting pneumonia. Conclusions: This study highlights being female, underweight, not starting complementary feeding and starting complementary feeding before 6 months as risk factors and thus a need for health policies and nutritional interventions in children below five years to provide a basis for reducing the burden.