- This retrospective cross-sectional study was carried out at the Obstetrics and Gynaecological Department of Hamdard Hospital, Karachi, Pakistan, from March 1, 2019, to August 31, 2019. A total of 195 healthy mothers and their newborns were included in the study. Institutional Review Board of the hospital gave the ethical approval of the study. Written informed consent was taken from all of the participants prior to their inclusion in the study.
- The percentage frequency of the study outcome was taken as 50% for the most liberal estimate, with 95% confidence level and 7% precision, and the minimum sample size was calculated to be 196 participants.
- Healthy pregnant females with either singleton or multiple pregnancies with at least three antenatal checkups were included, whereas females giving birth at gestational age less than 34 weeks or above 41 weeks and six days or with a complicated pregnancy were excluded from the study. All the pregnancies were followed up to the delivery. All the relevant data were gathered by trained data collectors with the help of a structured questionnaire, and the weight and height/length of the mothers and children were also measured.
- Data were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences Version 20.0 (IBM Corp., Armonk, NY, USA). Descriptive analysis was performed by generating means and standard deviations for continuous variables, and frequencies and percentages for categorical variables. Binary logistic regression was applied to develop a risk assessment model for the study outcome while keeping the significance level at 0.05.
- Results
There were a total of 195 pregnant females selected for the study. Frequency of low birth weight infants was found to be 57 (29.2%) in these women. The mean age of the mothers was 29.29±5.22 years; 142 (72.8%) of them had BMI of 25.0 or more, 102 (52.3%) had hemoglobin between 10 to 11 mg/dL, 172 (88.2%) used to take each of vitamin C and iron during pregnancy, 136 (69.7%) consumed extra meals during pregnancy, and only 5 (2.6%) were tobacco smokers/chewers (Table 1).
