Infant Mortality and the Low-Birth-Weight Infant

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Abstract
Neonatal mortality nose-dived between 1970 and 1980, largely because of increased survival of low-birth-weight infants, report McCormick et al1in this issue ofThe Journal. This dramatic surge in survival of infants at high risk, they note, has occurred in the wake of mothers delivering at perinatal centers with neonatal intensive care units. Because infant birth weight is the most important predictor of survival, studies of the low-birth-weight infant have appeared in every imaginable context in the epidemiologic and obstetric literature. The term has been applied to a homogeneous population of infants when, in fact, there are at least two groups: the term or small-for-gestational-age infant weighing less than or equal to 2,500 g and being older than 37 gestational weeks; and the premature neonate who also weighs less than or equal to 2,500 g but has a gestational age of less than 37 weeks. The small, term newborns have

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