Abstract

OVIES CARBALLO, Gisel; SANTANA PEREZ, Felipe  and  PADRON DURAN, Rubén S. Caracterización de la lactancia materna en un área urbana. Rev Cubana Med Gen Integr [online]. 1999, vol.15, n.1, pp.14-18. ISSN 0864-2125.

A descriptive and cross-sectional study of 872 women who lived in an urban area and had given birth from 1 to 12 months before was conducted in order to know the duration, pattern of breast feeding, and the causes to abandon it. 1.1 % of these women never started breast feeding due to agalactia. Women began to breast feed their children in an average time between 1 and 15 days. Among those who had abandoned breast feeding at the time of the study the mean time of duration was 108.5 days. The life table technique was applied to the group that was not breast feeding so as to determine the continuity rate and the risk of leaving breast feeding. In the first case there is only 51 % of probability to continue lactating from 4 to 5 months, and in the same period the weaning risk is 0.83 %. The most frequent reason to leave this practice was the complete loss of milk. Only 32.6 % of the studied population used breast feeding exclusively. It is concluded that there is a high trend to abandon breast feeding early and, mainly, the exclusive one

Keywords : BREAST FEEDING.

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