Original ArticleBowel Habits and Toilet Training in Rural and Urban Dwelling Children in a Developing Country
Section snippets
Methods
This cross-sectional, descriptive study was conducted in the rural and urban areas of the province of Sindh, Pakistan, from September 2009 to February 2010. Initially a pilot study was done by interviewing 50 parents of children between 5 to 8 years of age regarding bowel habits and toilet training.
Approval to conduct this study was obtained from the institutional review board of Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi. The sampling technique was purposive sampling. In the actual study, two
Results
A total of 1000 questionnaires, 500 from the rural and 500 from urban areas for developmentally normal children between 5 and 8 years of age were obtained. Age, sex, and BMI were comparable in the two populations. The mean ± SD age of all children in the study was 6.5 ± 1.1 years. In the rural population it was 6.1 ± 1.1 years, and in the urban population it was 6.4 ± 1.0 years (Table I). For both populations, the number of boys and girls were comparable. Most of the rural (98%) and urban
Discussion
On the basis of the Rome III Pediatric Committee definition of functional constipation13 and the Bowel Habit Questionnaire score used by Wald et al,14 a constipation score for every child was calculated, on the basis of which we concluded that constipation was likely to be more prevalent in rural children. Most children in our study had daily bowel movements. In a cohort of 300 Burmese children, 90.3% of children defecated once or twice daily.15 This is also consistent with the findings in
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The authors declare no conflicts of interest.