ArticleAmerican journal of epidemiology2024
The pandemic preterm paradox: a test of competing explanations.
Article in American journal of epidemiology, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- Parental socioeconomic composition of birth cohorts changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Prematurity and Multidimensional Risk Patterns in Adolescent and Adult Pregnancies: A Principal Component Analysis in an Eastern European Cohort.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Hard Hit: The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on childbearing in the Hispanic/Latino population.SSM - population health · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Epidemiologists have long argued that side effects of the stress response include preterm birth. Research reports that fear of lethal infection stressed pregnant persons at the outset of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and that "shutdowns" and "social distancing" impeded access to social support and prenatal care. The decline in preterm births in high-income countries, including the United States, during the early months of the pandemic therefore poses a paradox for science. Explanations of this "pandemic preterm paradox" remain untested. We applied time-series modeling to data describing 80 monthly conception cohorts begun in the United States from July 2013 through February 2020 to determine which of 3 explanations most parsimoniously explained the paradox. We infer that "prior loss," or the argument that an increase in spontaneous abortions and stillbirths depleted the population of fetuses at risk of preterm birth, best explains data currently available. We describe the implications of these results for public health practice.
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