Analysis Of Risk Factors Associated With Acute Respiratory Infections Among Under-Five Children In Uganda

Globally,7.4 million young children are being killed from infectious and treatable diseases like Acute Respiratory Infections(ARIs),sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 90%of deaths where 70%occur among children below 5 years of age.In Uganda,ARIs disease remains the leading deadliest disease among under-five children.The study purpose was to identify important and potential contributing risk factors of childhood ARIs disease among underfive children in Uganda.A case-control study was conducted on 13,493 sampled under-five children.Child and parental characteristics are drawn from the 2016 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey were analyzed using two supervised logistic regressions and two tree-like structure data mining methods for disease outcome classification such as cases and controls.75%training set was used to fit methods and 25%test set was used for predictions.The results revealed that the Random Forest performed better(Accuracy=88.7%,AUC=0.951)in classifying ARIs outcomes compared to other methods.The following method was logistic regression(Accuracy=62.1%,AUC=0.639)which showed that the risk of developing childhood ARIs disease decline with an increase in years of age where the risk was higher in one year children(OR=1.27,p<0.001)and lower in children in age four(OR=0.69,p<0.001)compared to infants.Other factors such as the age of mother where children born from teenage(15-19 years)mothers were high likely(OR=1.28,p<0.001)to have ARIs illness compared to other age groups,and children whose mothers breastfed showed a lower risk of ARIs disease(OR=0.83,p<0.001)compared to those who not breastfed.In the dry season,children were more likely to develop ARIs disease(OR=1.34,p<0.001)compared to the wet season,and factors such as the region of residence like central region,mother employment especially those who work,and domestic cooking energy like wood were also found as the potential risk factors of childhood ARIs disease that have to be considered in taking precautions and measures in reducing under-five children ARIs prevalence in Uganda.Government and healthcare stakeholders need to make effective programs to improve public health policy against childhood infectious diseases.