Our data showed that infant’s rate of growth were consistently below the 3rd percentile of the WHO growth velocity standards, implying inadequate nutrition even in the earlier periods of infancy. While the Zambian infants were growing at a slower rate, even by the time they entered the cohort at 6 weeks of age, the results from the present study also indicated that linear growth faltering is worst at 13.6 months of age. This is the time when nearly all the infants have completely been weaned off breastmilk.
A significant number of infants still do not benefit from optimum breastfeeding practices. Issaka et al report that in Southern Africa the overall prevalence of predominant breast feeding ranged between a lowest of 17.63% (95% CI 12.70 to 22.55) in East Africa and a highest of 46.37% (95% CI 37.22 to 55.52) in West Africa [12]. This is below the WHO/UNICEF optimum recommendation of breastfeeding for two years [1]. Breastfeeding for the first six months is crucial to child development and fundamental to the protection against illnesses. It gives infants all the nutrients they need for healthy development and contains antibodies that help protect infants from common childhood illnesses like diarrhea, and pneumonia: the two primary causes of childhood mortality worldwide [13].
While exclusive breastfeeding seems like a logical low/no cost intervention, its practice in Zambia is rather low. In our earlier study, the prevalence of exclusive breast feeding in children up to 5 months ranged between 39 and 45% [14]; and these findings are similar to what Tembo et al reported elsewhere, with a high start at 96% in the first two months of life and rapidly falling to 16% by 5 months [15]. Studies, including meta-analyses have demonstrated significant benefits of exclusive breastfeeding on diarrheal and pneumonia morbidity and mortality in children [16,17,18]. In early infant life, there are three issues of major concern for growth: first is whether the child was born healthy without any genetically determined defects; second, is the environment and hygiene practices to safeguard against infections; and third, of relevance to this paper is nutrition that the child needs to develop. The infants in our cohort were clinically healthy and enrolled during routine immunization visits, and thus somewhat normal growth trajectory was expected. However, our findings suggest, in the very least, that their nutrition may have been inadequate.
Inadequate nutrition not only predispose to acute morbidity (particularly diarrhea and pneumonia), it causes deleterious effects to infant’s growth, eventual cognitive development and future livelihood [17,18,19]. Thus, current global wisdom suggests that new born infants should be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life and then additional soft feeds introduced gradually while breast feeding should continue for up to 18–21 months of age [20,21,22]. Early introduction to solid foods is problematic as it results in low iron stores by displacing energy rich and highly bioavailable iron in breastmilk, and increase the risk of diarrheal diseases [20, 23].
In our study, all mothers self-reported exclusive breast feeding, but it is likely that there could have been over reporting, especially given WHO global reports on Zambian that only 40% of infants less than six months of age are exclusively breastfed [24]. We have previously reported gross non-compliance to the international code for marketing breastmilk supplements by the private sector; and this very likely adds to negative influences against best breastfeeding practices in Lusaka [25]. However, the downside to exclusive breastfeeding is its association with increased risk of HIV transmission from mother to child [18, 26, 27]. This is particularly important in many areas of sub-Saharan Africa like Zambia where HIV prevalence is high [28].
However, the practicality of avoiding exclusive breastfeeding remains challenging even in light of maternal HIV especially among low social economic status populations. Cost, adequacy, hygiene, water safety and ability to appropriately mix formula are well known challenges [24, 29]. Indeed a relationship has been demonstrated between poor feeding practices and incidence of diarrhea in infants [30]. One episode of acute severe gastroenteritis is known to rob the child of substantial stored nutrients such as zinc and vitamins [31, 32]. Nutrient deficiencies can rarely occur in isolation to a single micronutrient, thus it is reasonable to expect that range of key growth nutrients (including copper, iron, magnesium, selenium, zinc, vitamins A, B12, D and folate) are lost together during diarrhea. Moreover, gastroenteritis often induces both vomiting and/or loss of appetite, and thus no replenishment is occurring during that period; therefore, it is logical to suggest that diarrhea deprives the child of both stored nutrition and food intake: material needed for growth [33, 34]. Our study reported an average of 1.1 (SD = 1.2) episodes of diarrhea per child over the duration of follow up, suggesting that each child experienced at least one episode of diarrhea between the time they enroll and exited the study.
While this study has showed a slower growth in our cohort, it had some limitations. First, it was not primarily designed as an anthropometric study; rather, the parent study was focused on understanding factors that influence rotavirus vaccine taken in healthy infants [8]. Second, although common to all longitudinal studies which follow up participants over time, some children did not have anthropometric data at all time points to be included in the statistical model; fortunately, this problem was limited because there is no evidence that the missingness were systematic to cause substantial bias. Also, children in our cohort did not have length measurement recorded at birth, which may have underestimated the empirical height velocity at 0–3 mo age group. Notwithstanding these limitations, there is a clear indication that the infant population under 2 years of age possesses a growth trajectory characteristic implying that they are growing slower than expected. Indeed, while others have shown that the HAZ approach may not be entirely accurate in showing actual height gain differences [35], these data have also highlighted the importance of growth velocity as a more robust and dynamic measure of linear growth.