Predicción de fallas del crecimiento en niños menores de un año

Abstract

Research carried out in Santiago, Chile, showed that primary prevention of deficient weigh gains during infancy required evaluation of the likelihood of this unwanted outcome in individual children. In this regard, the risk approach has proven useful for developing predictive tools with scoring curves based on relative risk, derived from both individual and group susceptibilities and exposure levels to adverse conditions. This study presents the results of the monitoring from birth to one year of age of 1 151 infants born during January 1982 at five maternity hospitals of the National Health System of the Metropolitan Area, and evaluates the synergistic effects of various variables pertaining to the mother and child with the level of child growth deficiencies. The results of using these variables in both the simple relative risk tehnique and the logistic regression procedure were compared, and the latter was found to be more effective. Most of the children (876) were followed for a year, the remaining 275 being followed for 90 days. The risk factors are the predective tool utilized by the simple relative risk method, and they permit two curves to be plotted: biomedical risk (which considers birth weight, birth order, age and parity of the mother, and diseases of the mother and newborn), and family incompetence (which takes into account parental occupation, mother's education, the quality and