Objective: Mobile phones are used in research studies, to enroll and follow-up participants, collect data, and implement mHealth initiatives. We conducted a longitudinal study in a birth cohort, where infants were required to make four scheduled visits by 12 months of age. Families of those failing to attend scheduled follow-up visits, were contacted telephonically to ascertain the reasons, which were categorized as: not interested to continue participating, migrated, phone disconnected due to telecom change, or other reason. Results: A total of 413 mother-infant dyads were enrolled. The overall attrition was 56%, with majority occurring at the first follow-up visit. This temporally coincided with a telecom service provider announcing strong incentives to switch providers. Attrition monotonically decreased at subsequent visits. The reasons were: moved away (13%), no longer interested (8%), phone disconnected (7%), and multiple other reasons (28%), the majority of whom had unreachable phones. Those who remained in the study and those lost to follow-up were similar on most demographic variables. Among common reasons for attrition in cohort studies, we experienced a new dimension introduced by telecom changes. These findings underscore the need to consider unexpected reasons for attrition in longitudinal studies, and design more robust methods to follow-up participants.
CITATION STYLE
Mathew, J. L., Patel, P. N., Wagner, A. L., Suri, V., Bharti, B., Carlson, B. F., & Boulton, M. L. (2021, December 1). Analysis of reasons for loss to follow up in a prospective study in Chandigarh, India and impact from telecom changes. BMC Research Notes. BioMed Central Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-021-05837-9
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