Journal of Pregnancy and Child Health
Open Access

Prevalence, Determinants and Pregnancy Outcomes of Under-Nutrition among Women Accessing Antenatal Care or Attending Antenatal Clinic Public Hospitals in Ibadan Nigeria

Received Date: Aug 01, 2022 / Published Date: Aug 30, 2022

Copyright: © 2022  . This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Background: Nutrition plays a major role in the health of a pregnant woman and that of the foetus in-utero. The nutritional status
of a woman before and during pregnancy is an important factor in deciding the outcome of that pregnancy. Worldwide, almost
two billion people are said to be affected by various form of malnutrition or the other which accounts for about 11% of the global
burden of the disease. Maternal under nutrition has been implicated as one of the major risk factor for poor pregnancy outcomes
such as obstructed labour, preterm birth or low-birth-weight (LBW) babies and bleeding after delivery. Malnutrition amongst
women of reproductive age has been recognized as life threatening public health issues in the world with emphasis on many sub-
Saharan African and Asia Countries. Maternal under-nutrition is also of great concern in a country like Nigeria as 12% of women
of reproductive age are undernourished with body mass index, or BMI (< 18.5) (NNHS, 2018). This condition result from so many
multiple factors such as poor nutritional practices, lack of quality health care facilities and access to services, lack of portable
drinking water, poor environmental sanitation, armed conflict particularly in the north leading to displacement of farmers from their
farm land, climate change, high unemployment and extreme poverty. It is therefore very crucial to carry out this study on under
nutrition and its implications on the pregnant women and their babies.
Aim of the study: To assesses the prevalence, determinants and pregnancy outcomes of under-nutrition among women
attending ANC in public hospitals in Ibadan, Nigeria.
Methodology: A purposive sampling technique will be used to select five health care facilities (1 tertiary, 1 secondary and 3
primary health care) based on client inflow for antenatal care services (ANC) and a proportional allocation of samples will be done
across these facilities. A total of 1159 pregnant women will be administered the structured questionnaire and 736 (348 exposed
and 348 non-exposed) will be recruited for the prospective cohort study. These populations will be grouped into exposed and
unexposed using their nutritional status. They will then be followed up till delivery to determine the effects of under-nutrition on
the pregnancy outcome which includes both the maternal anemia, mode of delivery and weight gain and neonatal outcomes (Low
birth weight, still birth, preterm delivery neonatal death. Data will be entered in excel spread sheet for data cleaning and data will
be transferred to SPSS version 251 for analysis.

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