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PREGNANCY AND PERINATAL HEALTH, BAMEN, INNER MONGOLIA, CHINA
Citation:
LOBDELL, D. T., R. K. Kwok, L. He, M. Yang, J. L. Mumford, P Mendola, AND Z. Liu. PREGNANCY AND PERINATAL HEALTH, BAMEN, INNER MONGOLIA, CHINA. Presented at 17th Annual Society for Epidemiologic Research, Salt Lake City, Utah, June 14-15, 2004.
Description:
For developing countries, especially in remote rural areas, measures of maternal and perinatal health may be difficult to obtain because it is not systematically collected and/or electronic data is not available. We assisted the public health officials of Bayingnormen (BaMen), Inner Mongolia, China, to computerize their public health records. Descriptive analyses were completed using the Examination Chart for Pregnant Women (contains routine prenatal care, delivery, and postnatal visit health information) for approximately 22,000 pregnancies between December 1, 1996-December 31,1999 in a three-county area of BaMen. The mean maternal age was 25.4 years (~pm~2.6 years) with a very low percentage of pregnant teens (0.1%). The majority of pregnant women were primigravid (80%). Approximately 74% of the women had at least one prenatal care visit during the first trimester increasing to almost 99% within the third trimester. Over 95% of the deliveries were achieved with vaginal labor with only four percent cesarean deliveries. Only 396 (1.8%) of the deliveries were preterm (<37 weeks gestation) and 232 (1.1%) infants were born low birthweight (<2.5 kg). A low number of stillborn deliveries (n=50; 0.2%) and neonatal mortality (n=144; 0.7%) were observed. Breastfeeding was the most common newborn feeding method for the BaMen mothers (for the first seven weeks of life, 97.3% natural breast milk, 0.9% artificial milk, and 1.8% mixture of natural and artificial milk). This database provides a rich source of perinatal health measures for this region. (This is an abstract of a proposed presentation and does not necessarily reflect EPA policy.)