Pattern of Delivery and Early Initiation of Breastfeeding: An Urban Slum based Cross Cut Study

Delivery is a natural phenomenon for reproductive aged women.Normal and cesareanboth are going on and affects early initiation of breast feeding i.e. colostrum feeding.The initiation of breastfeeding within one hour and continuation of only breast milk up to six months ensure maximum benefits.The prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding in Bangladesh is 64% which is low.Particularly, in slum areas the practice of exclusive breastfeeding among breastfeeding mothers are not being adopted with importance.This cross sectional study was conducted to study pattern of delivery and early initiation of breastfeeding in selected slums of Dhaka city from 1 July'2016 to 10 April'2017 among conveniently selected 354 infant (0-12months)-mother pairs.Two-third and one-third of the deliveries were normal and cesarean.Three-fourth of the births was term birth where one-fourth was delivered as preterm babies.It showed that 44% infant started breastfeeding within one hour and 56% started more than one hour.Early initiation of breast feeding was greater among the infants whose pattern of delivery were normal than their cesarean counterpart which was highly significant.Besides percentage of early initiation of breast feeding was greater among the normal term birth babies than that of preterm birth and it was statistically significant.So high rate of early initiation of breast feeding was seen in case of normal delivery and term baby though more than half of the baby started initiation of breast feeding after one hour of birth.