A birth weight adjusted comparison of perinatal mortality in the Faroe Islands and Denmark

The objectives were to compare perinatal mortality (PNM) in the Faroes and Denmark while accounting for the high birth weights in the Faroes, and to discuss methodological aspects related to this task. We applied conventional methods employing absolute birth weight standards, and the Wilcox-Russell way of comparing relative birth weights. During 1977-85 perinatal mortality (PNM) in the Faroes was 14.7 (98 cases) per 1,000 births, and 1.57 times higher than that in Denmark. Conventional method: birth weight-standardised risk ratio for PNM in the Faroes v Denmark was 1.95; the risk ratio declined with increasing birth weight. Wilcox-Russell model: the risk tended to be more uniformly increased across the birth weight distribution when babies with same relative birth weights were compared; the residual component of the birth weight distribution (i.e. the excess of observed births in the lower tail beyond what could be predicted by a Gaussian distribution) was 2.1% in the Faroes and 3.6% in Denmark, which does not fit with the model assumption that the size of the residual component is a strong determinant of a population's PNM.