Razi Journal of Medical Sciences

  Background : Failure To Thrive (FTT) is the delay or suspension in child growth not dealing with this disorder may lead to more serious consequences like increased death rate, appearance of other relevant diseases, reduced learning, and mental, emotional, or physical disabilities. Given the serious symptoms of failure to thrive in children’s future, this paper tries to identify and investigate factors affected in FTT.

  Methods: The study population included children below 2 years old visiting the Health Center of East Tehran from which 1660 infants using two-stage cluster sampling method were selected according to the input criteria (not suffering from any particular disease at birth, and having regular visit to health centers). After gathering data from the first two years of the infants’ lives, factors associated with FTT using SAS software and Random Effect Regression Model were analyzed.

  Results: Mean age (± SD) of mothers at birth time was 27.3 ± 5.46 years and 46% (764) of the mothers had an education lower than high school diploma but there was no significant relationship between mothers’ education and FTT (p = 0.290). Mean weight (± SD) of children at birth was 3202 ± 463.03 g and 5.1% (85) of them were born with underweight (2500g) and 68.1% (1130) of the children were affected by FTT at least in one period. Factors associated with diarrhea, infection, teething, nourishment, weaning, and other diseases had significant role in causing FTT (p < 0.05), out of which the cause of diarrhea was the most likely factor. In addition, the model’s random section became significant (p < 0.05).

  Conclusion: Given the abundance and graveness of the symptoms of this disorder in child’s future and the high likelihood of occurrence of this disorder among infants below 2 years, a strong need is felt to deal with this impairment. Given the significance of the random effect, the known causes alone are not enough for prediction of FTT among infants and genetic and environmental factors play a role in occurrence of FTT as well.