Determinants of Low Birth Weight in the Nabdam District of the Upper East Region, Ghana

Background: The incident of low birth weight and its associated implication has become a great public health concern. Low birth weight is the birth weight of a child less than 2.5 kg. several factors have been implicated in the development of low birth weight. The purpose of the study was to assess the determinant of low birth weight.

Methods: A quantitative cross-sectional design was conducted with a sample size of 183 post-natal women who had delivered 12 months and below in the district. The participants were interviewed using structured questionnaire. Purposive sampling technique was used in recruiting the participants for the study and ethical approval sought from the Nabdam District Health Directorate. An SPSS version 20 was used to process the data and generated the descriptive statistics such as frequencies, percentages, mean, mode and standard deviations.

Results: Out of 183 new born babies, 146 (79.8%) were normal whiles 37 (20.2%) had low birth weight. The impact of marriage, education, place of stay, planned pregnancy employment and health insurance were significant with a p-value of < 0.001. Maternal and obstetric factors such as parity, gestational age at delivery and mode of delivery had p-values of <0.001 which were significant. The effect of gestational age at ANC, number of ANC visits anemia in pregnancy, religion and age had no association with low birth weight.

Conclusions: This study shows that among babies born to mothers with increased parity, low level of education, unemployed and short gestational ages were at risk of low birth weight. Therefore, in order to reduce the high prevalence of low birth weight in the community, every pregnant woman should be encouraged to obtain the national health insurance cards that will enable them attend regular antenatal clinics.