Description:
Background:WHO has developed an indicator to measure exclusive breastfeeding using 24 hoursrecall. This single day indicator doesn‘t capture the usual feeding history which may lead to exaggeration of exclusive breastfeeding rateand misclassification of infants as being exclusively breastfed where infact the infant is not. This indicates the need to look for an indicator which could provide better information on the actual breastfeeding practice.
Objective:To assess the validity ofweek recall in estimating exclusive breast feeding rate when compared to cumulative result of14repeated 24 hour recall among infants less than 6 months of age in Butajira, Ethiopia.
Method: Community based cross sectional study was conducted among 408 mother infant pair less than 6 months of age in ButajiraHDSS. Data on Exclusive breastfeeding practice was collected using 24 hour recall, and short period recalls for 14 consecutive days. Short period recalls was conducted starting from the second day to the last day of interview. During short period recall interview, mother was asked to recall 48 hour feeding practice, 72 hour feeding practice, 96 hour feeding practice and so on until the last day of interview. Data was entered by using Epi data software version 3.2 and exported to STATA for analysis. Estimation of the prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding was done using the methods. McNemar test was done to assess if there was significant difference in EBF rate between the methods. P-value of <0.05 was considered to indicate a significant difference in prevalence. Sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive value was computed to check the validity on the performance of each method in estimating Exclusive breastfeeding prevalence against the cumulative of 14 repeated 24 h recall.
Result: The highest prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding (71.4%) was obtained when single 24 hour recallwas used. 14 repeated 24 hour recall resulted in EBF rate of 47.31%. Taking 14 repeated 24 hour recall as a reference, the lowest discrepancy (6.9%)obtained was from 7 days recall.Seven day(week) recall also reflected EBF practices with sensitivity of 96.7% and specificity of 83.5%.Conclusion:Current EBF status based on 24 hour EBF recall does not accurately represent the feeding pattern. Week recall had high specificity and presented a prevalence that is close to gold standard methodindicating it could be an alternative method to assess EBF practice.