Zinc deficiency during pregnancy has been reported to retard foetal growth and to cause chromosomal aberretioas and various congenital defects in animals (I, 2, 3). Recently, low birth' weight (LBW) infants and their mothers were reported to have lower serum zinc levels as compared to controls (4). This has, however, been contradicted by other workers (5, 6). The present investigation was, ther...

The "fetal origins" hypothesis suggests that fetal conditions not only affect birth characteristics such as birth weight and gestational age, but also have lifelong health implications. Despite widespread interest in this hypothesis, few methodological advances have been proposed to improve the measurement and modeling of fetal conditions. A Statistics in Medicine paper by Bollen, Noble, and Ad...

Methods Parents of infants aged between 12 and 15 months, residents in six Brazilian cities: Belém, Belo Horizonte, Cuiaba, Curitiba, Recife and São Paulo, participated in interviews between 2005 and 2010 answered the questionnaire EISL. The infants were divided according to birth weight: normal weight (NW= 2,500g or more) or low birthweight (LW = less than 2,500g). Infants were also divided ac...

abstract  background: low birth weight neonates are confronted with some problems after  birth, they should be followed up and evaluated at different ages of life.the aim of this study was to determine the impact of birth weight on the risk of sensorineural hearing impairment on children.  method: this cross sectional and retrospective study determined the prevalence  of hearing problems in low...

After having eliminated a dysfunction of the hospital's ventilation system and any other possible environmental reservoir, the investigation of a fatal case of primary cutaneous aspergillosis in a neonate with extremely low birth weight led to the conclusion that nonsterile disposable gloves kept stored in their native packages were the likely source of contamination.

Verner et al. (2013) recently questioned whether the association between cord levels of PCB-153 (poly chlorinated biphenyl-153) and birth weight reported in our recent metaanalysis (Govarts et al. 2012) might be attributable to the influence of gestational weight gain (GWG), a factor that may be related to both PCB-153 concentrations and birth weight. By using simulated data in a physiologicall...

We reconsider the effect of very low birth weight classification on infant mortality. We demonstrate that the estimates are highly sensitive to the exclusion of observations in the immediate vicinity of the 1,500-g threshold, weakening the confidence in the results originally reported in Almond, Doyle, Kowalski, and Williams (2010).

Birth weight is in large extent influenced by gestational age. In addition genetic and environmental factors determine intrauterine growth and birth weight. The contributions of these factors may be influenced by maternal smoking during pregnancy. We examined birth weight and maternal smoking in a sample of 2930 twin pairs from the Netherlands Twin Register using structural equation modelling. ...