Treatment outcome and factors affecting time to recovery in children with severe acute malnutrition treated at outpatient therapeutic care program

摘要

BackgroundThe outpatient therapeutic care program (OTP) of children with severe acute malnutrition (SAM) has been decentralized to health post level in Ethiopia since 2008–2009. However, there is a lack of evidence regarding treatment outcomes and factors related to the duration of stay on treatment after its decentralization to health post level.ObjectiveThis study was aimed to assess treatment outcome and factors affecting time to recovery in children with SAM treated at OTP.DesignHealth facility–based retrospective cohort study was conducted using data from 348 patient cards. The outcome variable was time to recovery. Descriptive analysis was done using percentages for categorical data and mean/median for continuous variables. A robust method of analyzing time to event data, the Cox proportional-hazard regression, was used. All statistical tests in this study are declared significant at p0.05.Result89.1% of children with kwashiorkor and 69.4% of children with marasmus were recovered. Of the total chil...