Evidence map›Paper›PMID 25079936›Full record

ArticleBMJ open2014

Applying measures of discriminatory accuracy to revisit traditional risk factors for being small for gestational age in Sweden: a national cross-sectional study.

Sol Pía Juárez, Phillip Wagner, Juan Merlo

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Article in BMJ open, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.

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0cells of the map it votes in
6citing papers in PubMed
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1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

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3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

6 citing papers in PubMed.

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4 · The record

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5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Sol Pía JuárezCenter for Economic Demography, Lund University, Sweden Department of Clinical Sciences, Unit of Social Epidemiology, Lund University, Malmö, Skåne University Hospital (SUS Malmö), Malmö, Sweden.
Phillip WagnerDepartment of Clinical Sciences, Unit of Social Epidemiology, Lund University, Malmö, Skåne University Hospital (SUS Malmö), Malmö, Sweden.
Juan MerloDepartment of Clinical Sciences, Unit of Social Epidemiology, Lund University, Malmö, Skåne University Hospital (SUS Malmö), Malmö, Sweden.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

objectivesSmall for gestational age (SGA) is considered as an indicator of intrauterine growth restriction, and multiple maternal and newborn characteristics have been identified as risk factors for SGA. This knowledge is mainly based on measures of average association (ie, OR) that quantify differences in average risk between exposed and unexposed groups. Nevertheless, average associations do not assess the discriminatory accuracy of the risk factors (ie, its ability to discriminate the babies who will develop SGA from those that will not). Therefore, applying measures of discriminatory accuracy rather than measures of association only, our study revisits known risk factors of SGA and discusses their role from a public health perspective.

designCross-sectional study. We measured maternal (ie, smoking, hypertension, age, marital status, education) and delivery (ie, sex, gestational age, birth order) characteristics and performed logistic regression models to estimate both ORs and measures of discriminatory accuracy, like the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AU-ROC) and the net reclassification improvement.

settingData were obtained from the Swedish Medical Birth Registry.

participantsOur sample included 731 989 babies born during 1987-1993.

resultsWe replicated the expected associations. For instance, smoking (OR=2.57), having had a previous SGA baby (OR=5.48) and hypertension (OR=4.02) were strongly associated with SGA. However, they show a very small discriminatory accuracy (AU-ROC≈0.5). The discriminatory accuracy increased, but remained unsatisfactorily low (AU-ROC=0.6), when including all variables studied in the same model.

conclusionsTraditional risk factors for SGA alone or in combination have a low accuracy for discriminating babies with SGA from those without SGA. A proper understanding of these findings is of fundamental relevance to address future research and to design policymaking recommendations in a more informed way.

Indexed as

Infant, Small for Gestational AgeAge FactorsArea Under CurveCross-Sectional StudiesEducational StatusFemaleFetal Growth RetardationHumansHypertensionInfantInfant, NewbornLogistic ModelsMaleMarital StatusPregnancyPregnancy Complications

Identifiers

PMID25079936
PMCPMC4120345

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.