Impact of socio-demographic variables on antenatal services in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract

We investigated the impact of socio-demographic variables on antenatal care (ANC) utilization and the low birth weight of a child. Data were collected from 300 pregnant females. Only 22.5% of females received full antenatal care (≥4 visits). Our results showed that female’s age at marriage and education plays a significant role in improving ANC. We observed an overall decrease in the utilization of services provided during each antenatal visit. ANC visits from the first trimester decrease the risk of having a baby with low birth weight. Awareness programs and educating families about pregnancy care are recommended to improve ANC utilization.

Acknowledgements

We thank all the volunteers for participating in this study. Financial assistance in the form of Junior Research Fellow and Project Manager by Department of Biotechnology (DBT) New Delhi, India to the first and second author, respectively, is duly acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author’s responsibilities

RB: formed the research idea, recruited and interviewed the participants, prepared the first draft of the manuscript, and had primary responsibility for the final content; KS: guided the data analysis and research component, edited and finalized manuscript; AS: data collection and statistical analysis; PV, VS, SB, GPS: data collection and oversight of the statistical analysis; OPS: facilitated the recruitment of participants from a local hospital and data analysis. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

Ethical approval

This study is funded and approved by the ‘Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India’. Ethical approval for carrying out this study was obtained from the Institutional Ethical Committee, Institute of Science, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi, India (Ref. No. F.Sc./Ethical Committee/2014-2015). Written permission for fieldwork in the concerned area was obtained from the Chief Medical Officer, District Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported under the grant 102/IFD/SAN/4713/2015-2016 and BT/PR16349/MED/97/291/2016 from the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, New Delhi.