OBJECTIVES: Women are the leading utilization trends of health products or therapies for their health care and wellbeing during pregnancy, which has received much attention recently. In recent years it’s been reported the insufficiency of evidence for safety and effect of complimentary and alternative medicine (CAM), health products and herbal medicine on fetal development and the possibility of CAM-drug interaction. Hence, the present study was aimed to investigate the prevalence, types of CAM as well as sociodemographic factors associated to the use of CAM among pregnant women attending a poly clinic health center for antenatal care.

METHODS: An institution based a cross-sectional study conducted on 282 pregnant women visiting poly clinic health center for anti-natal care follow up from March to May 2018. Structured questioners were used for the survey. Descriptive statistics of participants’ sociodemographic and CAM use characteristics were expressed in frequencies and proportions. The odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) obtained from logistic regression models were taken as the measures of association between CAM use and selected sociodemographic predictors. The result was considered significant if p-value < 0.05.

RESULTS: Out 282 pregnant subjects, 252 (89.36%) pregnant women reported using some form of CAM, whilst 30(10.63 %) were non-users of CAM. The odds of using CAM were higher among subjects who have education level of College/University (OR:1.30, CI:0.31-5.44) whereas participants who were obtained monthly income of 500-999 ETB had lower odds of using CAM (OR:0.24, CI:0.06-1.01).

CONCLUSIONS:A great proportion of pregnant women in this study are utilizing CAM products as part of their maternity care. A considerable concern should be given in the use of CAM modalities during pregnancy.