Maternal Age and Infant Mortality: A Test of the Wilcox-Russell Hypothesis
| Autor: | Howard Stratton, Erin K. O'Neill, Fu Fang, Timothy B. Gage |
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| Rok vydání: | 2008 |
| Předmět: |
Male
Pediatrics medicine.medical_specialty Epidemiology Original Contributions Birth weight New York Logistic regression 01 natural sciences Statistics Nonparametric 010104 statistics & probability 03 medical and health sciences 0302 clinical medicine Pregnancy Covariate medicine Humans latent variable 030212 general & internal medicine 0101 mathematics business.industry logistic regression Infant Newborn birth weight Infant mixture of normal distributions medicine.disease Infant mortality infant mortality 3. Good health Parity Low birth weight Logistic Models Gestation Female medicine.symptom business Maternal Age Demography |
| Zdroj: | American Journal of Epidemiology |
| ISSN: | 1476-6256 0002-9262 |
| DOI: | 10.1093/aje/kwn308 |
| Popis: | It has been argued (e.g., the Wilcox-Russell hypothesis) that (low) birth weight is a correlate of adverse birth outcomes but is not on the "causal" pathway to infant mortality. However, the US national policy for reducing infant mortality is to reduce low birth weight. If these theoretical views are correct, lowering the rate of low birth weight may have little effect on infant mortality. In this paper, the authors use the "covariate density defined mixture of logistic regressions" method to formally test the Wilcox-Russell hypothesis that a covariate which influences birth weight, in this case maternal age, can influence infant mortality directly but not indirectly through birth weight. The authors analyze data from 8 populations in New York State (1985-1988). The results indicate that among the populations examined, 1) maternal age significantly influences the birth weight distribution and 2) maternal age also affects infant mortality directly, but 3) the influence of maternal age on the birth weight distribution has little or no effect on infant mortality, because the birth-weight-specific mortality curve shifts accordingly to compensate for changes in the birth weight distribution. These results tend to support the Wilcox-Russell hypothesis for maternal age. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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