Transactions of The Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of The Society for Maternal-Fetal MedicineBirth weight and fetal death in the United States: The effect of maternal diabetes during pregnancy☆
Section snippets
Material and methods
This was a population-based, retrospective study assembled by the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using the national natality and mortality data for US births (1995-1997). The data conform to uniform coding specifications that have been carefully edited, have passed statistical quality checks, and form the basis for official US birth and death statistics. This study was approved by the institutional review board at the University of
Results
The overall fetal death rates among infants of nondiabetic and diabetic patients were 4.0 and 5.9 per 1,000 births, respectively. As shown in Table I, nondiabetic and diabetic patients were clinically comparable with respect to age, gravidity, race/ethnicity, and marital status.Maternal characteristics Nondiabetics (n = 10,462,292) Diabetics (n = 271,691) Maternal age (y)* 26.8 ± 6.1 29.8 ± 5.9
Comment
There have been many studies evaluating birth weight as a predictor of survival. Generally, these studies have focused on extremes of weights and have provided evidence to support that these extremes of weights are associated with adverse perinatal outcomes.8 The bulk of studies, however, have focused on the lower end of the spectrum, and it is now well accepted that lower-birth-weight babies, smaller babies, and growth-restricted babies have an increased risk of fetal death.1, 2, 3 In an
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