Presentation
Disparities of Breast Feeding Practices among Black and White Women in North America. Results from Adventist Health Study (AHS 2)
Abstracts of the 46th Annual SER (Society for Epidemiologic Research) Meeting
(2013)
Abstract
Background: Racial disparities of breast feeding have been reported invarious studies, but few have evaluated the factors associated with racial dis-crepancies in breastfeeding. Method: We evaluated breastfeeding patternsamong 24,436 white and 10,196 black parous females, aged 30-80 years,who were enrolled in the Adventist Health Study-2, a cohort of 96,000health conscious subject across the US and Canada. Two outcomes wereevaluated: 1) initiation of breastfeeding and 2) length (months/child) ofbreastfeeding using multiple logistic and multiple linear regression, respec-tively. Analyses were adjusted for age, education, parity, body mass index,marital status, country lived during young adult life (age 16-25), oral contra-ceptive use and dietary patterns. Results: Black women were less likely tohave breastfed than white women (Odds Ratio = 0.37, 95% Confidence In-terval: 0.34-0.41) and breastfed on average 1.2 months shorter per childthan white women. Older women were less likely to have breastfed theirchildren (OR = 0.77, 0.41, 0.30 for ages 41-50, 51-60 and 61-80 respective-ly compared to 30-40 year olds (p-trend <0.001). Vegetarians were morelikely to initiate breast feeding than non-vegetarians (OR = 2.01). Other in-dependent predictors of initiation of/duration of breastfeeding were age, ed-ucation, living outside of the US at age 16-25, parity, marital status,BMIand oral contraceptive use. Conclusions: Black women were less likely toinitiate breastfeeding and, if breastfeeding, did so for fewer months thanwhite women. The racial difference remained virtually unchanged evenafter adjusting for a number of socio-economic factors including age,marital status, education and place lived during early adulthood. The ob-served racial disparity warrants further study into possible factors that canexplain the strong differences seen. Attitudes towards breastfeeding, in par-ticular, need to be investigated among blacks and white females in the US.
Disciplines
Publication Date
June, 2013
Location
Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Citation Information
Sozina Katuli. "Disparities of Breast Feeding Practices among Black and White Women in North America. Results from Adventist Health Study (AHS 2)" Abstracts of the 46th Annual SER (Society for Epidemiologic Research) Meeting (2013) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/sozina-katuli/14/