Kelali Tesfaye Techane*, Dinkesa Aklilu Bezu
Background: Human milk is very important for infant nourishing. Scholars in the field recommend that mothers begin early and only breast milk for their new born babies until the age of 6 month. Infants should breast fed until the age of two and above besides supplementary foods.
Purpose: The main objective of the study is to assess the time to cessation of breastfeeding in mothers with children aged birth to three years in Mekelle town, 2019.
Methods: A retrospective follow up study was conducted at Mekelle town from November 2018/2019 to April 30, 2019. A probability sampling technique was used to select 503 mother-child pairs. Data was collected using an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Data entered in to EPI-data before exported to SPSS 23. Bivariate cox was used to identify factors associated with cessation of breast feeding and multivariate cox proportional regression models were used to prevent the effect of cofounding.
Results: Cessation of breast-feeding incidence rate before 24 months was 3.017 per 100 person-months. Above 54.3% of study subjects were found breastfeeding for 2 years long. After removing potential cofounders’ maternal employee, mode of delivery, first feeding and bottle feeding were importantly related with time to cessation of breastfeeding.
Conclusion: According to this study cessation of breastfeeding was virtuous. Maternal occupation, time of solid food introduction, bottle feeding, maternal depression and first feeding were significantly associated to cessation of breastfeeding.
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