No direct correlation between rotavirus diarrhea and breast feeding: A meta-analysis

Background Some studies indicated that children with exclusive breast feeding had a reduction in the prevalence of rotavirus diarrhea, while some others held the opposite views. In this study, we aimed to systematically find the associations between rotavirus diarrhea and breast feeding. Methods A literature search up to June 2016 in electronic literature databases, including PubMed and Embase, was performed. The Newcastle–Ottawa Scale was used to conduct the quality assessment of all the selected studies. Statistical analyses were performed using the R package version 3.12 (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Beijing1, China, meta package), and odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence interval (CI) were used to assess the strength of the association. The heterogeneity was assessed by Cochran's Q-statistic and I 2 test, and the sensitivity analysis was performed by trimming one study at a time. Results A total of 17 articles, which included 10,841 participants, were investigated in the present meta-analysis. There was no significant difference between the case group and control group (OR, 0.59 95% CI 0.33–1.07) in the meta-analysis of exclusive breast feeding, and no significant difference was found between the case group and the control group (OR, 0.86; 95% CI 0.63–1.16) in the meta-analysis of breast feeding. No significant difference was found between the case group and control group (OR, 0.78 95% CI 0.59–1.04) for all quantitative data. Conclusions There may be no direct correlation between rotavirus diarrhea and breast feeding.