Feeding characteristics of infants in a lower‐middle‐income country
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIM: To describe feeding characteristics (such as breast feeding and complementary feeding) and determine the nature of feeding difficulties of infants in a primary health-care clinic (PHC) in South Africa. METHODS: A total of 200 infants aged 6-12 months (mean = 8.54, standard deviation = 2.18) received a feeding screening by a speech-language therapist at a PHC in a semi-urban area using the Montreal Children's Hospital-Feeding Scale (MCH-FS). Children who failed screening underwent further clinical feeding evaluation using the Schedule of Oral Motor Assessment. RESULTS: The sample consisted of 200 participants, and most participants (n = 174; 87%) received breastfeeding, irrespective of their mothers' human immunodeficiency virus status. The longer the breastfeeding period, the less likely parents were to show concern about infants' feeding (P = 0.035). Complementary feeding was introduced between 6 and 8 months (n = 122; 82%). The MCH-FS identified 13 participants with feeding difficulties (6.5%), of which 11 were diagnosed with oral motor dysfunction (OMD) using the Schedule of Oral Motor Assessment. The 6.5% (n = 13) that failed had mild (n = 8; 61.5%), moderate (n = 2; 15.4%) and severe (n = 3; 23.1%) feeding difficulties, as reported by care givers using the MCH-FS. The MCH-FS showed that distraction during meals/following infants (n = 42; 21%); food refusal (n = 31; 15.5%); care giver unease about feeding (n = 29; 14.5%); and problems with vomiting, gagging or spitting (n = 28; 14%) were characteristics of feeding in this sample. Participants in the age groups 6 (n = 3; 27.3%) and 10 months (n = 3; 27.3%) were prone to OMD. CONCLUSIONS: This study is the first of its kind to describe the feeding characteristics of a group of infants during the transitional feeding stage in late infancy in South Africa. Important findings were the existence of OMD in 11 infants and feeding difficulties during transitional feeding in 13 infants. The study's findings may be used as a starting point for larger-scale studies in a similar setting, investigating the development of future care giver education and health-care professional training programmes regarding transitional feeding. Research endeavours by speech-language therapists need to prioritise late infancy and transitional feeding in order to prevent possible difficulties arising from sub-optimal care giver feeding practices. The study may be valuable to all health-care providers in PHC.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".