Feeding characteristics of infants in a primary health care clinic in South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND There is a limited amount of literature on the feeding characteristics and nature of possible feeding difficulties of infants in a primary health care (PHC) in South Africa. OBJECTIVE To describe feeding characteristics and determine the nature of feeding difficulties of infants in a PHC setting in South Africa. METHOD Two hundred infants aged six to 12 months (mean age = 8.54, Standard Deviation = 2.18) received a feeding screening by a speech-language therapist at a well-baby clinic in a semi-urban area using the Montreal Children’s Hospital-Feeding Scale (MCH-FS). A clinical feeding evaluation using the Schedule of Oral Motor Assessment (SOMA) was completed with 13 infants who failed the screen. RESULTS The MCH-FS identified 13 participants with feeding difficulties (6.5%) of which 11 were diagnosed with oral motor dysfunction (OMD) using the SOMA. 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 caregivers using the MCH-FS. The MCH-FS revealed that distraction during mealtimes/following (n=42;21%), food refusal (n=31; 15.5%), caregiver 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 six (n=3;27.3%) and 10 months (n=3;27.3%) were prone to OMD. Complementary feeding was introduced appropriately between six and eight months in the majority of the sample (n=122;82%). CONCLUSION The study was 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. The findings may be used as a starting point for larger scale studies in a similar setting, investigating the development of future caregiver education and health care professional training programmes regarding transitional feeding.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".