The article I chose is that of “Lindam, A., Johansson,S., Stephansson, O., Wikström, A., Cnattingius S., (2016) High Maternal Body Mass Index in Early Pregnancy and Risks of Stillbirth and Infant Mortality—A Population-Based Sibling Study in Sweden, American Journal of Epidemiology , Volume 184, Issue 2, Pages 98–105, https://doi.org/10.1093/aje/kww046 ’’
1. State the type of study that was conducted (see methods section of article, it must be one of the above study types).
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The type of study conducted in this article was an analytical study because they had two control groups for the study. The controls were the sister controls and the population controls with both having single births during the time of study.
2. What is the research question?
Does familial confounding influence the associations between maternal overweight/obesity and risks of stillbirth and infant mortality?
3. What was known or unknown before the study was conducted (see introduction of article)?
What was unknown before this study was whether familial confounding did influence the associations between the maternal weight or obesity and the risks of stillbirth and infant mortality experienced during birth.
4. What was the purpose of the study (should be at end of introduction)?
The main of purpose of this population-based study was to find out the associations between Body mass index in early stages of pregnancy and the risks of one having a still birth or experiencing infant mortality. They had to achieve using reference groups of sister controls and population controls.
5. What was the outcome and was it consistent with the researcher(s)' original research question (see results and conclusions)?
After the study, they did find out that that the risks associated with still birth did increase with increased obesity and overweight when using population and sister controls as their reference group. For the infant mortality they did find that obesity and not overweight in early pregnancies was linked to high infant mortality rates irrespective of the control group. This then means that the outcome was not consistent with the researcher’s original question because the association between stillbirth, BMI, and infant mortality are not based on the familial factors.
6. What recommendation(s) did the researcher offer for future studies (see conclusions)?
The researchers feel that for future studies, ways to control obesity in early pregnancies should be studied so to reduce the risks of women having still births and thus reducing infant mortality rates.
7. Do you feel the findings and research design are real and valid? Why or why not? Please review the lesson for this week and your text book readings to understand what is meant by valid.
The findings are real and valid because a good research has to have controls and a good representative study population. For this study it had two controls namely; population and sister controls. For example the case-controls, they found 527 cases of still birth, 201,813 population controls, 527 sister controls when studying live births during the 28 th week of gestation.
References
Lindam, A., Johansson, S., Stephansson, O., Wikström, A., & Cnattingius, S. (2016). High Maternal Body Mass Index in Early Pregnancy and Risks of Stillbirth and Infant Mortality—A Population-Based Sibling Study in Sweden. American Journal of Epidemiology, 184(2), 98-105. doi:10.1093/aje/kww046
Huang, Y., & Xu, X. (2018). Faculty of 1000 evaluation for Maternal Body Mass Index and Use of Labor Neuraxial Analgesia: A Population-based Retrospective Cohort Study. F1000 - Post-publication Peer Review of the Biomedical Literature. doi:10.3410/f.733581778.793551625
