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American Journal of Epidemiology Advance Access originally published online on November 21, 2008
American Journal of Epidemiology 2009 169(3):294-303; doi:10.1093/aje/kwn308
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American Journal of Epidemiology © 2008 The Authors
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTIONS

Maternal Age and Infant Mortality: A Test of the Wilcox-Russell Hypothesis

Timothy B. Gage, Fu Fang, Erin O'Neill and Howard Stratton

Correspondence to Prof. Timothy B. Gage, Department of Anthropology, AS 114, College of Arts and Sciences, University at Albany–State University of New York, Albany, NY 12222 (e-mail: tbg97{at}albany.edu).

Received for publication November 28, 2007. Accepted for publication September 8, 2008.

It has been argued (e.g., the Wilcox-Russell hypothesis) that (low) birth weight is a correlate of adverse birth outcomes but is not on the "causal" pathway to infant mortality. However, the US national policy for reducing infant mortality is to reduce low birth weight. If these theoretical views are correct, lowering the rate of low birth weight may have little effect on infant mortality. In this paper, the authors use the "covariate density defined mixture of logistic regressions" method to formally test the Wilcox-Russell hypothesis that a covariate which influences birth weight, in this case maternal age, can influence infant mortality directly but not indirectly through birth weight. The authors analyze data from 8 populations in New York State (1985–1988). The results indicate that among the populations examined, 1) maternal age significantly influences the birth weight distribution and 2) maternal age also affects infant mortality directly, but 3) the influence of maternal age on the birth weight distribution has little or no effect on infant mortality, because the birth-weight-specific mortality curve shifts accordingly to compensate for changes in the birth weight distribution. These results tend to support the Wilcox-Russell hypothesis for maternal age.

birth weight; infant mortality; latent variable; logistic regression; mixture of normal distributions

Abbreviations: CDDmlr, covariate density defined mixture of logistic regressions


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