Developmental impact of very low birth weight status on childhood disability: logit model
by
Sara Marques Simões Dias
ISEGI-UNL, Campus de Campolide, 1070-312 Lisboa, Portugal
Coauthors: Maria Rosário Oliveira Martins

The index of maternal, perinatal and childhood mortality improved during the last decades and brought a significant profit to the Portuguese Public Health. Wich allowed getting rates of fetal and perinatal mortality such as the developed countries. The perinatal care gave an enormous contribution to the increase of the survival rates from 1996 to 2000.

With this study we intend to prove that following up premature babies and very low weight children along their childhood can be extremely important to the behavioural and cognitive development.

This study aims to compare different low birth weight children and to identify variables that most significantly contribute to psychomotor development of premature babies. We want to estimate the effect of very low birth weight in the cognition and in the behaviour of children. To investigate this, we applied a logit model to explain the general developmental outcomes, delays, and impairments of very low birth weight children. To measure the model’s ability we estimated the area under the ROC curve.

Besides the weight at birth, the explanatory variables include biomedical factors (mother’s age, prenatal care, sex of the baby) living arrangements (mother’s education, race, social problems, family structure).

The estimation of the different presented models allows us to verify that the maternal educational and birth weight are the most significantly factors to the child’s development.

The finding in this paper is that it is necessary to follow up these children up to adulthood. They have to be followed by qualified medical and educational professionals. These results have great influence in the Public Health.

Key-words: Very low birth weight, risk factors, children development, logit model, ROC curve.

Date received: July 28, 2006