الفهرس 
Material and methodsOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
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The study was carried to evaluate the impact of infant feeding pattern on child health.
To reach this aim infants attending three MCH centres in cairo representing three different zones with variable sociocultural and economic strata to study the effect of these factors on infant feeding pattern and consequently on child health.
The study sample included 1033 infants subjected to cross sectional study and other group of 244 infants subjected to longtudinal study with 3 monthly examinat-ions for five visits.
The study included survey of the infant feeding pattern past and present, attitude of mother twards breast, artificial or mixed feeding, her ideas and att-itude twards weaning and introduction of weaning foods.
The socio cultural and economic stundards of family which characterise the biological enviroment as well as the source of knowledge about infant feeding and how they get benefit from available medical services in the vicinity after this detailed survey, the infants were
subjected to complete clinical examination and assessment of the nutritional status, then subjected to complete developmental assessment with evaluation of gross motor development, fine motor development, hand eye coordination, visual competence, hearing and speech and social behariour
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and play.
AdraW-a-man test was done to assess mental developm-ent whenever feasible.
These data were potentiated with anthropometric mea-surements to assess the physical growth.
The results of this study revealed that the best enviroment for infants optimum physical, mental, and psy-chological development is to have a good mother, keen to breast feed her baby as long as possible giving him supp-lementary food within the digestable capacity of his gas-tro intestinal tract and of high nutritional value. To fulfill this target the mother must be prepared in early life to her future job as a mother with proper health edu-cation and above all to have economic facilities to apply health instructions without budgetary restrictions. A normal infant mother relationship in particular and norm-al family interrelation ship in general help normal psyc-hological development of the infant.
The health status of the infants is the final outc-ome of many factors interacting with each other. These include, nutrition, infections, deficiency diseases, bio-logic characteristics of the enviroment.
In this study some mothers of the studied infants coming from families of high income standards breastfed their babies from 6-12 month. They start supplementary feeding by the age of 4-5 months usually by yoghort. In
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case of scanty milk supply for any reason, these mothers give dried milk in supplementary or complementary fash-ion.
These feeds are given in proper amount and dilution and usually under the supervision of a specialist. Home or commerical Biekosts of expensive type and of high nut-ritional value are used to supplement the milk feeding.
It was noted that these mothers always support lact-ation by eating more additional food of high nutritional value. The health of their infants showed avanced param-eters on developmental assessment. Cases of obesity were higher and PEM cases were lower among this group and if it occured it was of the mild degree.
The majority of mothers belonging to this group were from Heliopolis center.
Mothers from low income families and those from moderate income families constituted the majority of mothers coming from the middle zone and south zone center respect-ively.
These mothers used to breast feed their babies exclu-sively for one year or more and did not support lactation in most of the cases. Breast feeding was sometimes mixed with fresh fluid animal milk and dried milk.
However these artificial feeds were used only in irre-gular and over diluled and underhygeinic conditions. These feeds were supplemented by home or commerical Biekosts of
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cheap variety like ”Biscuits and RiRi” i.e of low nutritio-nal value)Infants in this group have higher incidence of delayed parameters of development, increased incidence of PEM specially of the moderate and severe degrees, higher incidence of gastro intestinal infections and lower inci-dence of obesity.
In addition to this higher morbidity rate, the mort-ality rate is also higher among this group of infants.