ArticleSSM - population health2026
Empirical vulnerability strata in under-five mortality in Cameroon: Evidence from DHS data.
Article in SSM - population health, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Despite substantial declines in under-five mortality in sub-Saharan Africa, child survival remains marked by persistent and socially structured inequalities. Variable-centered survival models document average effects of risk factors but provide limited insight into how multiple disadvantages combine to generate heterogeneous mortality risks. This study aims to identify and characterize empirical configurations of vulnerability in under-five mortality in Cameroon. Using pooled data from the 2011 and 2018 Cameroon Demographic and Health Surveys, we analyze time to death before age 59 months. A random survival forest is used as an exploratory survival-based tool to derive individual risk scores, which serve to stratify children into ordered mortality risk strata and then summarized using weighted Kaplan-Meier estimates. Three distinct mortality risk strata emerge. The highest-risk stratum, with an estimated probability of death before age five of 27.8%, concentrates overlapping disadvantages, including low birth weight, short birth intervals, limited maternal and partner education, lack of antenatal care, home delivery, low media exposure, and constrained maternal decision-making autonomy. These configurations are observed consistently across survey waves, indicating persistent social structuring of mortality risk. Under-five mortality in Cameroon remains sharply stratified along cumulative social, reproductive, and gender-related dimensions. Inequalities in child survival are produced not by isolated risk factors but by socially embedded configurations of disadvantage. This study contributes to demonstrate how survival-based machine learning can be combined with conventional statistical tools to reveal socially interpretable strata of vulnerability, shifting attention from marginal covariate effects to empirical configurations of cumulative mortality risk.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.