Incidence of neonatal mortality and its predictors among live births in Ethiopia: Gompertz gamma shared frailty model

BACKGROUND: Neonatal mortality remains a serious public health concern in developing countries including Ethiopia. Ethiopia is one of the countries with the highest neonatal mortality in Africa. However, there is limited evidence on the incidence and predictors of neonatal mortality at the national level. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the incidence of neonatal mortality and its predictors among live births in Ethiopia. Investigating the incidence and predictors of neonatal mortality is essential to design targeted public health interventions to reduce neonatal mortality. METHODS: A secondary data analysis was conducted based on the 2016 Ethiopian Demographic and Health Survey (EDHS) data. A total weighted sample of 11,022 live births was included in the analysis. The shared frailty model was applied since the EDHS data has hierarchical nature, and neonates are nested within-cluster, and this could violate the independent and equal variance assumption. For checking the proportional hazard assumption, Schoenfeld residual test was applied. Akakie Information Criteria (AIC), Cox-Snell residual test, and deviance were used for checking model adequacy and for model comparison. Gompertz gamma shared frailty model was the best-fitted model for this data since it had the lowest deviance, AIC value, and the Cox-Snell residual graph closet to the bisector. Variables with a p-value of less than 0.2 were considered for the multivariable Gompertz gamma shared frailty model. In the multivariable Gompertez gamma shared frailty model, the Adjusted Hazard Ratio (AHR) with a 95% confidence interval (CI) was reported to identify significant predictors of neonatal mortality. RESULTS: Overall, the neonatal mortality rate in Ethiopia was 29.1 (95% CI: 26.1, 32.4) per 1000 live births. In the multivariable Gompertz gamma shared frailty model; male sex (AHR = 1.92, 95% CI: 1.52, 2.43), twin birth (AHR = 5.22, 95% CI: 3.62, 7.53), preceding birth interval less than 18 months (AHR = 2.07, 95% CI: 1.51, 2.85), small size at birth (AHR = 1.64, 95% CI: 1.24, 2.16), large size at birth (AHR = 1.53, 95% CI: 1.16, 2.01) and did not have Antenatal Care (ANC) visit (AHR = 2.10, 95% CI: 1.44, 3.06) were the significant predictors of neonatal mortality. CONCLUSION: Our study found that neonatal mortality remains a public health problem in Ethiopia. Shorter birth interval, small and large size at birth, ANC visits, male sex, and twin births were significant predictors of neonatal mortality. These results suggest that public health programs that increase antenatal care service utilization should be designed to reduce neonatal mortality and special attention should be given for twin births, large and low birth weight babies. Besides, providing family planning services for mothers to increase birth intervals and improving accessibility and utilization of maternal health care services such as ANC is crucial to improve neonatal survival.