1. Determinants of birth weight in Portugal: 1988 to 2011
- Author
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Carlota Santos, Vicente Fuster, and Universidade do Minho
- Subjects
Adult ,Male ,Humanidades::História e Arqueologia ,Birth weight ,História e Arqueologia [Humanidades] ,Emigrants and Immigrants ,Immigration ,Gestational Age ,Maternal ,Biology ,Odds ,03 medical and health sciences ,Young Adult ,0302 clinical medicine ,Pregnancy ,030225 pediatrics ,medicine ,Birth Weight ,Humans ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Schooling ,Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics ,Science & Technology ,Portugal ,Incidence (epidemiology) ,Infant, Newborn ,Gestational age ,General Medicine ,Infant, Low Birth Weight ,medicine.disease ,Weight ,Low birth weight ,Characteristics ,Socioeconomic Factors ,Anthropology ,maternal characteristics ,Birth ,Gestation ,Animal Science and Zoology ,Female ,medicine.symptom ,Parity (mathematics) ,Demography ,Iberian Peninsula - Abstract
The objective of this paper is to analyse temporal birth weight variation, its relationship to the frequency of premature births in Portugal, and the influence of native and immigrant mothers' characteristics as well as to determine the possible existence of a pattern of temporal change in birth weight in the Iberian Peninsula as a whole. Individual mother-child data from the Portuguese National Institute of Statistics regarding live births (N = 2,661,542) permitted an analysis, for the first time, of weight at birth in Portugal from a bio-demographic perspective. The results obtained show that from 1988 to 2011 there was a gradual decline in the average weight at birth in Portugal that may be related to shifts in the duration of gestation. An initial rapid decline in the relative frequency of post-term births took place, followed by small variations from 1995 on. Logistic regressions indicated a pattern unaffected by maternal origin or the sex of the newborn. With regard to weeks of gestation, the odds values obtained were < 1 when the reference category was < 28 weeks. For this factor, no significant differences were found in relation to the mother's origin. Portuguese mothers over 35 years were associated with a higher incidence of low birth weight. Regardless of maternal origin, being a newborn of parity 1, and with the mother not in a couple, resulted in unfavourable outcomes with regard to low birth weight. On the other hand, long gestation periods and having secondary or university education constituted a protective factor., The authors thank the Portuguese Institute of Statistics for the facilities provided in order to obtain the data. This study has been partly supported by the project "Urban Spaces: Demographic and Social Dynamics (17th-20th centuries)", reference PTDC/HIS-HIS/099228/2008, co-financed by the programme COMPETE-Operational Programme for Factors of Competitiveness, funded by FEDER, and by Portugal's state-financed Foundation for Science and Technology as well by Project CGL2008-03737 (Spain)., info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
- Published
- 2014