Department of Statistics, Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Department of Biostatistics, St. John's Medical College, Bangalore, Karnataka, India. Correspondence to: Dr Tinku Thomas, Department of Biostatistics, St John's Medical College, St. John's National Academy of Health Sciences, Bangalore - 560 034, Karnataka, India.
Indian Pediatr. 2019 Nov 15;56(11):923-928.
Maternal recall of birthweight is a convenient and cost-effective way to obtain birthweight measurements when official records are unavailable. It is important to assess the validity of maternal recall of birthweight before using these measurements to draw conclusions about a population.
This is secondary analysis of data from a previous cohort study. We analyzed actual and reported birthweights of 200 mother-and-child pairs from Southern India. We validated maternal report of birthweight by generating correlation coefficients, summary statistics, and Bland-Altman plots. We ran simulations to evaluate how misclassification as low or normal birthweight changed with the mean birthweight of the cohort.
Reported birthweight was strongly correlated with actual birthweight (r=0.80, P<0.001); 55%, 78.5%, and 93% of subjects reported values within 50 g, 250 g, and 500 g, respectively of actual birthweight. None of sociodemographic covariates was significantly associated with the accuracy of maternal recall of birthweight. 7.5% of children were misclassified as either low or normal birthweight by reported birthweight. Simulations revealed that increasing the reported and actual birthweights by 500g reduces the misclassification rate from 7.5% to 1.5%.
Maternal recall is a sufficiently accurate measure of actual birthweight. However, the distribution of actual birthweight in the population must be taken into consideration when classifying babies as low or normal birthweight, especially in populations where mean birthweight is close to 2500g.
当无法获得官方记录时，产妇回忆的出生体重是一种方便且具有成本效益的获取出生体重测量值的方法。在使用这些测量值得出有关人群的结论之前，评估产妇回忆出生体重的准确性非常重要。
这是对先前队列研究数据的二次分析。我们分析了来自印度南部的 200 对母婴对的实际出生体重和报告出生体重。我们通过生成相关系数、汇总统计信息和 Bland-Altman 图来验证产妇报告的出生体重的准确性。我们进行了模拟，以评估低出生体重或正常出生体重的分类错误率如何随队列的平均出生体重而变化。
报告的出生体重与实际出生体重密切相关（r=0.80，P<0.001）；55%、78.5%和 93%的受试者报告的值分别在实际出生体重的 50g、250g 和 500g 以内。社会人口学协变量均与产妇回忆出生体重的准确性无显著相关性。7.5%的儿童被报告的出生体重错误地归类为低出生体重或正常出生体重。模拟结果表明，将报告的和实际的出生体重分别增加 500g，可将分类错误率从 7.5%降低至 1.5%。
产妇回忆是实际出生体重的一个足够准确的衡量标准。然而，在将婴儿归类为低出生体重或正常出生体重时，必须考虑人群中实际出生体重的分布，尤其是在平均出生体重接近 2500g 的人群中。
