Puerto Rican Maternal and Infant Health Study
Objectives
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Infant mortality is one of the foremost public health problems in the United States today. Although the infant mortality rate has declined throughout this century, the rate of decline has slowed in recent years. Moreover, racial and ethnic minorities continue to have strikingly higher rates of infant mortality than non-Hispanic whites. A major determinant of infant mortality, especially neonatal mortality, is low birth weight. The high prevalence of low birth weight among disadvantaged groups and the lack of improvement in recent years suggest that there continue to exist barriers to healthy behaviors during pregnancy and to adequate prenatal care. Understanding such barriers and developing policies to remove them require further attention to linkages between the socioeconomic position of minority groups, their family patterns, and maternal behavior.
The U.S. minority groups with the highest rates of infant mortality are African Americans, American Indians, and Puerto Ricans. Moreover, Puerto Ricans have significantly higher rates of low birth weight and infant mortality than other Hispanic groups. Despite these poor outcomes, we know little about the determinants of poor infant health among Puerto Ricans.
One reason for this gap in knowledge has been the paucity of data with which to study Puerto Rican infant health. Apart from data sets compiled from vital records, such as the Natality Files and the Linked Birth-Infant Death Data Sets of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), there have been no representative data sources on which to base studies. National health surveys appropriate for research on infant health have included too few Puerto Ricans to allow for the study of Puerto Ricans as a separate group. Vital-records-based data are very useful because they include information on the full population of births to Puerto Rican women, but vital records contain information on only a few social and economic variables. More detailed information is often available from clinic-based samples, but such samples are rarely representative of the larger population of concern.
Thus, the PRMIHS was designed to provide a rich source of data for studies of the factors related to infant health outcomes among Puerto Ricans.
Last modified: 02/13/06 | Contact Webmaster
