Low birth weight

Overview

Burden

No burden claims are published.

Claims and evidence

No claims are published for this condition yet.

Clinical links

Each link reports what one cited claim says about one population. "Evaluated for" means studied, not shown to work. These links do not show that anything is effective or right for you.

• Claim, not a settled fact Evaluated for this: Immediate kangaroo mother care (Evaluated for, seen from the other side)

  Applies to Newborn

  • Liveborn infants with a birth weight of 1.0 to under 1.8 kg (abstract: "between 1.0 and 1.799 kg"), of any gestational age, singleton or twin, by any mode of delivery, enrolled with their mothers within 2 hours of birth. About 20% of infants in this weight band born in the study hospitals were not enrolled because mother or newborn was too sick.
  • Tertiary hospitals. Intervention infants: a Mother-NICU (a neonatal intensive care unit with beds for mothers), then a KMC ward. Control infants: the NICU without the mother, then a KMC ward after stabilization.
  • Ghana (Kumasi), India (New Delhi), Malawi (Blantyre), Nigeria (Ile-Ife) and Tanzania (Dar es Salaam); cities per ANZCTR. The ICTRP mirror of the CTRI record does not name the fifth country; it lists it only as other.
  • Neonatal period
  • Gestational age Any, not restricted
  • Postnatal age 0 days to 0 days

  Follow-up From enrolment to 28 days of age, with a home visit on day 29. The second primary outcome window was enrolment to 72 hours.
  In the iKMC trial, babies weighing 1.0 to under 1.8 kg at birth who started continuous skin-to-skin care with their mother within hours of birth were less likely to die in their first 28 days than babies who started it only after they were stable. 191 of 1596 babies died in the immediate group and 249 of 1587 in the control group (adjusted risk ratio 0.75, 95% CI 0.64 to 0.89).

  Limitations. One trial in five tertiary hospitals in low- and middle-income countries, with an open-label design. It stopped early for benefit before reaching its target of 4200 infants. About 20% of infants in the eligible weight band were not enrolled because mother or baby was too sick. The authors say the effect of starting early cannot be separated from the mother's continuous presence (author manuscript, Discussion para 5), and that applicability to low-mortality, high-resource settings is untested (author manuscript, Discussion para 3). The per-arm denominators (1596 and 1587) are smaller than the numbers randomized (1609 and 1602). They come from the author manuscript's Table 3 only, its text does not state their basis, and they were not checked against the version of record.

• Claim, not a settled fact Recommended for this: Immediate kangaroo mother care (Recommended for, seen from the other side)

  Applies to Newborn

  • Preterm or low-birth-weight infants. This is broader than the iKMC trial's 1.0 to under 1.8 kg band.
  • Health-care facility or home. The A.1b remarks give separate conditions for each.
  • Global (WHO guideline; the setting text says "any country or setting")
  • Newborn, from birth
  • Gestational age Not reported
  • Postnatal age at least 0 days

  Follow-up Not applicable (recommendation context)
  WHO recommends starting kangaroo mother care as soon as possible after birth for babies who are born early or small (preterm or low-birth-weight infants). WHO rates this a strong recommendation based on high-certainty evidence.

  Limitations. The population, all preterm or low-birth-weight infants, is broader than any single trial. In facilities, the remarks exclude infants who cannot breathe spontaneously after resuscitation, are in shock or need mechanical ventilation. The PDF prints the strength parenthetical twice in succession. The GRADE evidence tables are in a web supplement that was not fetched.

Record details

Record id

maternal:low-birth-weight

Content hash

c04a35bce3db099f0a786a6d63239510ed99505264ca564642986bc3a96e8a31