[Feeding consequences of orphans after the mother's death: a study using text mining software]

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Pediatrics
• Information Science

Background:

• Maternal mortality poses significant risks to infant well-being and survival.
• Orphaned children face unique challenges in nutrition and health following the loss of their mothers.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze the feeding consequences for orphans under five after maternal death.
• To apply open-access text mining software for analyzing literature on maternal death and orphanhood.

Main Methods:

• Cross-sectional study of ten open-access articles from PubMed and BIREME (2005-2015).
• Text mining using TagCrowd, Textalyser, AntConc, and Voyant Tools for content analysis.
• Analysis of 67,642 words to identify frequent and contextual terms related to infant feeding and maternal death.

Main Results:

• The most frequent terms were CHILDREN (827) and DEATH (821).
• Least frequent terms included BREASTFEEDING (10) and NUTRITION (4).
• Analysis revealed that lack of maternal breastfeeding increases mortality risk, poor nutrition, and susceptibility to infections in orphans.

Conclusions:

• Text mining with open-access tools efficiently extracts relevant information on infant feeding post-maternal death.
• The findings highlight the critical role of breastfeeding in preventing infant morbidity and mortality among orphans.