Family physician count and service provision in Ontario and Alberta between 2005/06 and 2017/18: a cross-sectional study
McDonald T, Schultz SE, Green LA, Lethebe BC, Glazier RH. CMAJ Open. 2023; 11(6):E1102-8. Epub 2023 Nov 28.
Objective — To assess whether newborn screening analytes could be utilized beyond their traditional application to identify infants at high risk of mortality within the first 6 months of life.
Methods — We linked a province-wide newborn screening registry with health administrative databases to identify infant deaths within 6 months in a source population of live-born infants between 2010 and 2014. We used a nested case-control study design, in which all infant deaths between 7 days and 6 months of age were included as cases, and a random sample of infants from the source population were selected as controls and were matched to cases at a ratio of 10:1. We examined the association between mortality and screening analytes (acylcarnitines, amino acids, fetal-to-adult hemoglobin ratio, endocrine markers, and enzymes) using lasso regression to fit multivariable models.
Results — Among 350 infant deaths between 7 days and 6 months of age, and 3498 matched controls with complete data, our multivariable model demonstrated only modest ability to identify infant deaths (optimism-corrected c-statistic: 0.61, 95% confidence interval: 0.50–0.71).
Conclusion — We did not find newborn screening analytes to be strongly predictive of infant mortality between 7 days and 6 months of age in the general population of newborns. Future studies should investigate whether predictive modeling within more homogeneous cause-of-death categories could lead to improved predictive ability for infant mortality.
Fell DB, Wilson LA, Hawken S, Spruin S, Murphy M, Potter BK, Little J, Chakraborty P, Lacaze-Masmonteil T, Wilson K. J Matern Fetal Neonatal Med. 2021; 34(5):835-8. Epub 2019 May 2.
The ICES website uses cookies. If that’s okay with you, keep on browsing, or learn more about our Privacy Policy.