Birthweight-specific neonatal health : With application on data from a tertiaryhospital in Tanzania

Abstract

The following study analyzes birthweight-specific neonatal health using a combination of a mixture model and logistic regression: the extended Parametric Mixture of Logistic Regression. The data are collected from the Obstetric database at Muhimbili National Hospital in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and the years 2009 -2013 are used in the analysis. Due to rounding in the birthweight data a novel method to adjust for rounding when estimating a mixture model is applied. The influence of rounding on the estimates is then investigated. A three-component model is selected. The variables used in the analysis of neonatal health are early neonatal mortality, if the mother has HIV, anaemia, is a private patient and if the neonate is born after 36 completed weeks of gestation. It can be concluded that the mortality rates are high especially for low birthweights (2000 or less) in the estimated first and second components. However, due to wide confidence bounds it is hard to draw conclusions from the data