Low Birth Weight & Infant Mortality
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Low birth weight (less than 2500 grams) is the greatest risk associated with infant mortality and morbidity. In the United States, death in the first four weeks of life is forty times higher for low birth weight (LBW) infants than it is for normal weight infants, and accounts for two thirds of all neo natal deaths. For very low birth weight infants (1500 grams or less), the relative risk of a neonatal death is almost 200 times greater than it is for normal weight infants (Institute of Medicine, 1985). LBW infants are also five times more likely to die later in their first year than are normal weight babies, and account for twenty persent percent of postneonatal deaths (Kessel, 1984). In 1986, the United States ranked nine teenth among industrialized nations with respect to the death of infants less than one year old, with 10.4 deaths per one thousand births (The National Commission to Prevent Infant Mor tality, 1988).Background on Health and Societal Implications of Low Birth Weight Morbidity reports indicate that LBW infants are at increased risk for neurodevelopmental congenital anomalies, including permanent disabilities, learning disablilities, lower respiratory tract infections, iatrogenic complications, and other non specific morbidity (Institute of Medicine, 1985). Further, low birth weight is a significant problem to society in terms of health care delivery, loss of life and/or produc tivity, family dysfunction (including child abuse, and se
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erformed by pregnant women outside of the home, and both low weight births and prematurity.
Low Birth Weight and Prematurity: Defining
and Establishing the Relationship
A large majority of low birth weight infants are prema ture, although the reverse is not necessarily true. The dis tinctions bewteen LBW without prematurity and LBW with prema turity are important, because each condition is thought to have a different set of risk factors and different mechanisms of causation.
Prematurity was a widely used, but non specific, term until 1930 when a Finnish pediatrician, Yellpo, began using the birth weight of 2500 grams as a marker for high risk neonatal
10 11outcome. In 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) formally adopted the 2500 gram as an LBW marker, but simultaneously defined the birth of an immature infant as one occuring with a gestation of less than 37 weeks. Use of the 2500 gram marker was reinforced in 1950, when the WHO Expert Group on Prematur ity concluded that the definition of LBW as less than 2500 grams should be accepted until epidemiological studies indi cated that further clarification was needed.
During the 1961 meeting of the WHO Expert Committee on Maternal and Child Health, the defini
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5387
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)
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