Complementary Feeding Habits in Children Under the Age of 2 Years Living in the City of Adama in the Oromia Region in Central Ethiopia: Traditional Ethiopian Food Study

Determinants of timely initiation of complementary feeding among children aged 6-23 months in Ethiopia

Introducing complementary feeding either early or later than 6 months is associated with future negative health outcomes. However, many women in Ethiopia do not follow WHO standard time to feed their children, which might be due to various demographic, economic, access, and availability of services. Thus, we aimed to identify factors attributing to the problems to assist future interventions. We used cross-sectional EMDHS 2019 for this analysis. We cleaned the data and 4061 women with under 2 years children were identified. We applied multilevel binary logistic regression in Stata v.15. Model comparison was based on log-likelihood ratio, deviance, and other criteria. We presented data using mean, percent, 95% CI, and adjusted odds ratio (AOR). The timely complementary feeding was 36.44% (34.93-37.92%). Factors like preceding birth intervals (AOR = 1.97 95% CI 1.62-1.39), primary education (AOR = 2.26 95% CI 1.40-3.62), secondary above education (AOR = 1.62 95% CI 1.10-2.38), and rich wealth index (AOR = 1.25 95% CI 1.03-1.52) were some of the associated factors. The magnitude of timely initiation of complementary feeding was diminutive. Authors suggest that interventions considering maternal education, empowering mothers economically, equity access to health services, and birth planning a good remedy.

Incidence of celiac disease autoimmunity and associations with maternal tuberculosis and pediatric Helicobacter pylori infections in 4-year-old Ethiopian children followed up in an HLA genotyped birth cohort

BACKGROUND

The prevalence of celiac disease in the general population is mainly unknown in most of sub-Saharan African countries. The aim of this study was to determine the incidence of celiac disease autoimmunity (CDA) and its associations with latent Mycobacterium tuberculosis (LMTB) and Helicobacter pylori (HP) infections in Ethiopian children aged 4 years in an HLA genotyped cohort study.

METHODS

Of 1,389 recruited children between 2018 and 2022, 1,046 (75.3%) had been screened at least twice for celiac disease between the ages of 2 and 4 years using a tissue transglutaminase autoantibody (tTGA) ELISA kit. Tissue TGA-positive children were retested using radio-binding assays. CDA was defined as persistent-confirmed tTGA positivity in two consecutive samples. Associations of CDA with LMTB and HP were tested in a subpopulation of 752 children born to mothers who were previously tested for LMTB with IFN-γ and anti-HP antibodies in samples collected at a mean age of 49.3 ± 5.3 months.

RESULTS

Screening detected 38 out of 1,046 (3.6%) IgA-tTGA-positive children. Ten (1.0%) were confirmed to be positive, with six (0.6%) children diagnosed with CDA. The incidence of CDA at 4 years of age was 1.2 per 1,000 person-years. LMTB was found in 4 of 6 (66.7%) mothers with CDA children compared with 340 of 734 (46.3%) mothers of children without CDA (p = 0.424), while HP was found in 3 of 6 (50.0%) CDA children compared with 315 of 746 (42.2%) children without CDA (p = 0.702).

CONCLUSION

The incidence of CDA in Ethiopian children is lower than the pooled global incidence. Neither LMTB nor HP infections are associated with CD in Ethiopian children.