Premature labour and birth weight

Abstract

In recent years, various papers have referred to the birth weight of the African new-born child. They all agree that the birth weight of these infants is lower than that given for European and North African ones. This is a study of birth weights in relation to duration of pregnancy amongst Sudanese women. Documents of 4,000 Sudanese women delivered at Kharthoum Civil Hospital were studied in respect of birth weight and length of gestation. Evidence suggests that the main cause of reduced birth weight in this series is a raised incidence of labours before term. Two factors, malnutrition and fatigue, are almost certainly responsible for a reduced birth weight, which explains the smallness of the Sudanese infant and an unusually high incidence of labours before term.