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[Data on birthweight in developing countries: are surveys useful?]
J T Boerma1, K I Weinstein, S O Rutstein
1Proyecto TANESA, Mwanza, Tanzanía.
Insights
Demographic and Health Surveys provide valuable national estimates of mean birth weight and low birth weight incidence. However, recalled birth weight data has high misclassification, limiting individual-level analysis.
Area of Science:
- Demography
- Public Health
- Epidemiology
Context:
- Health facility statistics are the primary source for birth weight data in developing nations.
- These statistics often lack annual low birth weight incidence estimates and are prone to selection bias, excluding neonates not born in facilities.
Purpose:
- To evaluate the utility of Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data for estimating national mean birth weight and low birth weight incidence.
- To assess the accuracy of recalled birth weight and relative size at birth as indicators.
Summary:
- Cross-sectional DHS data, collected since 1990, can be a useful source for national birth weight estimations.
- While useful for population-level estimates, the data's misclassification rate is too high for individual-level assessment of low birth weight using relative size at birth.
Impact:
- Highlights the potential of existing survey data to inform public health strategies related to newborn health.
- Identifies limitations in data accuracy for individual-level analysis, guiding future data collection methodologies.
Abstract:
The main source of data on birth weight in developing countries is statistics from health facilities, although most developing countries do not produce annual estimates of the incidence of low birth weight from these data. Such estimates would be subject to selection bias as the data are usually limited to babies born within health facilities, and therefore are representative of a subgroup that is markedly different from the overall population of neonates. Since 1990 the Demographic and Health Surveys programme has included questions on recalled birth weight and relative size at birth in 15 national surveys. In this article, we show that these cross-sectional surveys can provide a useful data source for making national estimates of mean birth weight and the incidence of low birth weight. The extent of misclassification of birth weight is, however, too large to use the data on relative size as birth as an indicator of low birth weight at the individual level.