Social and biological issues in infant survivorship among Danish cohorts born between 1982 and 1990
Keywords:
infant mortality, birth weight, differential mortality, DenmarkAbstract
The purpose of this project is to identify possible differentials in the infant survivorship of the Danish cohorts bom between 1982 and 1990. The principal characteristics to be considered are gender and birth weight. Our data consist of official records of live births and infant deaths linked at the individual level. We report some rather detailed measurements of the survivorship impact of sex and birth weight in the framework of logistic regression and loglinear modeling. This paper gives strong support to sex and birth weight as major determinants of infant survivorship. Falling infant mortality is closely associated with increasing expected birth weight over the birth cohorts considered. The present paper should be seen as an appetizer for addressing the more general question of birth weight as an intermediate variable for survivorship impacts of biosocial factors related to the parents and to intrauterine gestation.
