Objective
This report aims at identifying mothers at health risk based on six important parameters namely gestation, smoking habit, pre-pregnancy weight, height, status, and age. Additional hospital resources are required to mothers at high risk of giving birth to low weight babies.
Result
In this respect, six variables were analysed from the sample of 1000 birth records from the year 2015. The six variables comprised of birthweight, gestation, smoking habit, pre-pregnancy weight, height, status, and age. First, the average birthweight of sample was compared with the 2004 record. The record shows that average birthweight was 3500 grams in the year 2004, which rose to 3540 grams in the year 2015. Therefore, it can be concluded that overall the nutrition has improved and the average birthweight has increased too.
Further results show that smoking mothers have low weight babies. In this respect, T-test results show that mean birthweight of baby of the non-smoking mother is 3647 grams, while the birthweight of smoking mother is 3373 grams. It should be noted that average birth weight of smoking mother is below the average birthweight of sample data (3540 grams). These results are in line with other research works such as (Knopik et al., 2016). Knopik et al. (2016) found that maternal smoking in a serious health concern for healthy fetus development. Another comparison of birthweight was made between indigenous and non-indigenous baby. Statistical results show that indigenous babies have an average birthweight of 3238 grams, while non-indigenous babies have average birthweight of 3556 grams. Therefore, results from the study show that a smoking mother needs more attention and extra resource at the time of birth in the hospital.
Table 1: Summary of birthweight
A regression analysis was conducted to predict birthweight based on the mother’s weight, height, age, and gestation. Results show that gestation value and smoking habit have significant impact on the birthweight of babies. However, other parameters such as age and mother’s weight are not good predictors of birthweight. For example, results show that on an average birthweight of baby increases by 12.09 grams for one day of gestation. It can be concluded that gestation and smoking habit are better predictors of birthweight than age and mother’s weight. Therefore, mothers who carry the baby for longer time before birth are more likely to give birth to healthier babies. On the other hand, mothers with lower gestation are more likely to be at risk. It should be noted that smoking habit has negative correlation to birthweight while the gestation has positive correlation. Therefore, hospital needs to pay more attention to mothers with lower gestation period and smoking habit.
Table 2: Coefficients of regression 6 for those variables
Conclusion
Based on the present discussion, gestation and smoking habit are good indicators of birth weight i.e. model 2 is the most promising predictor of birthweight having R2 of 0.1490. Other parameters such as age and pregnancy weight are not good indicators of birthweight. The results show that gestation is a positive indicator of health while smoking habit is a negative indicator of birthweight. Thus, hospital management should consider gestation and smoking habit as the best predictor of birthweight. This will help the hospital management determine mothers who require more attention. The Fisher test associated with regression model shows that there is enough scope to improve the present model by including other unmeasured parameters. For example, Bussieres et al. (2015) proposed that maternal prenatal stress level affects birthweight. Thus, present model can be improved by incorporating other parameters such as stress level.
References
Bussieres, E. L., Taranulsy, G. M., Pearson, J., Tessier, R., Forest, J. C., Giguere, Y. (2015). Maternal prenatal stress and infant birth weight and gestational age: A meta-analysis of prospective studies. Developmental Review, 36, 179-199.
Knopik, V. S., Marceau, K., Palmer, R. H., Smith, T. F., … Heath, A. C. (2016). Maternal smoking during pregnancy and offspring birth weight: A genetically-informed approach comparing multiple raters. Behavior genetics, 46, 353-364.