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Preterm Birth, Long-term Survival, and Fertility—Reply
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In Reply: Dr Liew and colleagues raise the question of whether birth weight or length of gestation is the more appropriate predictor when exploring the hypothesis of fetal origins of adult disease. While birth weight is a more accurate and reliable measure than gestational age, we chose to examine the association of gestational age with long-term survival because we believe that it may be a stronger as well as a more fundamental predictor of postnatal maturity and, therefore, long-term survival.1
Their contention that understanding the relative contributions of birth weight vs gestation is important given the differing underlying mechanisms is well founded. However, the terms low birth weight (<2500 g) and poor in utero growth or fetal growth restriction (<10th-15th percentile) must not be used interchangeably. Two-thirds of all low-birth-weight births are due to prematurity, so the fetus was destined to be of normal weight but had not had adequate . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Geeta K. Swamy, MD
swamy002@mc.duke.edu
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology
Truls Østbye, MD, PhD
Department of Community and Family Medicine
Duke University Medical Center
Durham, North Carolina
Rolv Skjærven, PhD
Section for Epidemiology and Medical Statistics
Department of Public Health and Primary Health Care
University of Bergen
Bergen, Norway
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RELATED LETTER
Preterm Birth, Long-term Survival, and Fertility
Gerald Liew, Jie Jin Wang, and Paul Mitchell
JAMA. 2008;300(2):167.
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