BACKGROUND: Acute respiratory infection, especially pneumonia, plays an important role in childhood morbidity and mortality, as much in Brazil as in the world. OBJECTIVE: To identify, using a hierarchical logistic regression model, the risk factors for hospitalization in children with pneumonia. METHOD: A hospital-basedcase-control study was performed at the University Hospital in Taubaté, SP between May and December of 2001. The cases studied were children diagnosed and hospitalized with pneumonia, and the controls were children hospitalized for causes other than respiratory infection. A hierarchical logistic regression model was applied. The model groups variables into 4 levels: socioeconomic; reproductive and gestational; environmental; and nutritional. After the univariate analysis, variables with p values < 0.20 were introduced into each level of the model, and those variables that maintained p values < 0.10 remained in the final model. Data compilation and analysis were performed using SPSS v.10 software. RESULTS: The final hierarchical logistic regression model identified the variables: level of education of the father, age of the mother, number of persons living in the house, birth weight, weight relative to age, and Z-score as risk factors for hospitalization with pneumonia. CONCLUSIONS: Interventions for the variables evaluated in this study can decrease the odds for hospitalization due to pneumonia.
Pneumonia; Logistic Models; Case-Control Studies; Risk Factors; Morbidity; Hospitalization
