Ng'andu N H, Watts T E
Department of Community Medicine, School of Medicine, Lusaka, Zambia.
J Epidemiol Community Health. 1990 Dec;44(4):281-5. doi: 10.1136/jech.44.4.281.
The aim was to investigate the relationship between duration of breast feeding and growth of children.
The study was a survey of randomly selected clusters of households.
The study was community based and took place in an urban township with a population of over 43,000 people in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia.
The sample consisted of 438 children aged 0 to 59 months surveyed between October 1984 and June 1986. Due to missing information, 394 children were used in the analysis.
After controlling for confounding variables, duration of breast feeding was found to be associated with height for age among children in their first two years of life, but not in the later years of life. There was no significant protective effect of breast feeding on undernutrition and acute malnutrition as measured by weight for age and weight for height.
The findings suggest that, in this community, duration of breast feeding is strongly associated with the linear growth experiences of children and the association changes with the infant's age. One strong risk factor suspected to be responsible for the poor growth performance of children in this study is the low nutritional quality of the weaning foods which are used to supplement breast milk during the lengthy weaning period.
旨在调查母乳喂养持续时间与儿童生长之间的关系。
该研究是对随机选取的家庭群组进行的调查。
该研究以社区为基础，在赞比亚首都卢萨卡一个人口超过43000人的城市乡镇开展。
样本包括1984年10月至1986年6月期间接受调查的438名年龄在0至59个月的儿童。由于信息缺失，分析中使用了394名儿童的数据。
在控制了混杂变量后，发现母乳喂养持续时间与儿童出生后头两年的年龄别身高相关，但在后期则不然。以年龄别体重和身高别体重衡量，母乳喂养对营养不良和急性营养不良没有显著的保护作用。
研究结果表明，在这个社区，母乳喂养持续时间与儿童的线性生长经历密切相关，且这种关联随婴儿年龄而变化。本研究中怀疑导致儿童生长发育不良的一个重要风险因素是在漫长的断奶期用于补充母乳的断奶食品营养质量较低。
