Low birth weight is one of the strongest predictors of infant mortality, especially in the neonatal period. In this paper, we use data from the 2015–2016 India’s National Family Health Survey to examine the effect of mother’s assessment of child’s body size at birth on four measures of mortality: infant mortality, neonatal mortality, post-neonatal mortality, and child mortality. Using the Cox proportional hazards model, we found that small babies were slightly more than one and a half times and very small babies nearly four times more likely than average or larger size babies to die in the neonatal period. This was true even when potential confounders were held constant. However, the effect of child size on mortality risk became progressively weaker, though highly significant, in the post-neonatal and early childhood periods. We also found that, in spite of significant sex differences in mortality during infancy and early childhood, boys and girls were equally sensitive to the harmful effects of smaller body size at birth on mortality risks.

中文翻译：

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印度儿童出生时体型对婴儿和儿童死亡率的影响

低出生体重是婴儿死亡率的最强预测因素之一，尤其是在新生儿期。在本文中，我们使用 2015-2016 年印度全国家庭健康调查的数据来检查母亲对出生时儿童体型的评估对四种死亡率指标的影响：婴儿死亡率、新生儿死亡率、新生儿死亡率和儿童死亡率. 使用 Cox 比例风险模型，我们发现小婴儿在新生儿期死亡的可能性是平均或较大婴儿的 1.5 倍多，而非常小的婴儿几乎是普通或较大婴儿的 4 倍。即使潜在的混杂因素保持不变，情况也是如此。然而，在新生儿后期和幼儿期，儿童大小对死亡风险的影响逐渐减弱，尽管非常显着。我们还发现，