Risk factors of infant mortality in Bangladesh

Abstract

BackgroundThere exist various studies on the cause and determinants of infant mortality in developing countries. However, to best of our knowledge, none of the studies have seen the effect of institutional delivery and infant's birth size on infant mortality in Bangladesh.MethodsData for this study comes from Bangladesh Demographic and Health survey 2014, which is a nationally representative cross-sectional survey. This study uses information on 7,886 infants to analyze the effect of institutional delivery and birth size on infant mortality. Bi-variate and cox regression technique were applied for analyzing the cross-sectional data drawn from representative survey.ResultsInfant mortality was significantly higher in mothers who did not deliver baby at institutions and did not take any antenatal checkups. A significant high infant mortality was found among mothers who belonged to poor wealth status than middle and rich. In addition, infants who had small and very small birth size at the time of delivery had significantly high mortality. The mortality was significantly high in male than female infants.ConclusionInfant mortality is low among those who delivers baby at institutions, takes antenatal checkups and have higher wealth status. Infants with average birth size and female have less mortality. To reduce the infant mortality in Bangladesh, institutional delivery, antenatal care, baby birth size, child sex and wealth index are important factors. There is urgent need to focus into these factors to reduce infant mortality in the country.