European Journal of Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences

FREQUENCY AND RISK FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH LOW BIRTH WEIGHT OF NEWBORNS BEING DELIVERED IN A TERTIARY CARE HOSPITAL IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY

Dr. Ehtesham Zahoor*, Noor Ul Huda Arshad, Feyiyemi Aina Afolabi, Erum Noor, Philip Oreoluwa, Syed Furqan Shah, Srikanth Gouni, Muhammad Ahsan Shafiq, Usman Haider Bhatti and Sana Saleem Tariq

ABSTRACT

Background: Being a developing country and having a great issue of malnutrition and chronic diseases, it has been seen that there is a high frequency of low birth weight infants in Pakistan. This study has been done to find out frequency and risk factors associated with low birth weight newborns. Objective: To assess the frequency and risk factors associated with a low birth weight of newborns delivering in the labor room of Darul Sehat Hospital, Karachi. Material and Methods: Study Design: Descriptive Study. Study Setting: Darul Sehat Hospital, Karachi Study duration: 1-month Duration (October 1st, 2019 – November 1st, 2019). Inclusion criteria: Patients presenting to Labor Room of Darul Sehat Hospital, consenting to be a part of this research and gave births to infants after 37 weeks of gestation and weighed less than 2500g. Exclusion criteria: Patients who did not consent, comatose patients, and those in serious conditions. Data Collection and analysis: 138 subjects fulfilling the inclusion criteria were included in our study. After verbal informed consent, a structured questionnaire was handed over or all the questions were directly asked from the patient by the group members in cases of illiterate patients. All the information will be collected in this structured questionnaire. Data will be analyzed by SPSS version 21.0. For quantitative variables, the mean and standard deviation will be computed and for qualitative variables, frequency and percentages will be calculated. Results: While trying to estimate frequency, we took random samples of patients among which 87% were born with normal birth weight (i.e 2500 grams) and 13% were born with low birth weight (i.e less than 2500 grams). It was found that work-related stress has been the leading cause of low birth weight in about 55.6% of patients among low birth weight groups. Conclusion: Women exposed to certain risk factors tend to give birth to low birth weight babies. Of these, stress, chronic infections, and malnutrition are important contributors.

Keywords: Low birth weight, anemia, stress, maternal age, paternal smoking.