Exploring vulnerability patterns in heat-related preterm birth: a multi-country multi-city analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Evidence suggests that high temperatures may trigger preterm birth (PTB), which is associated with a higher risk of infant mortality and morbidity during childhood and adult life. However, there is limited evidence on the role of sociodemographic factors on the vulnerability of pregnant women. In a multi-location setting, we aimed to assess 1) the effect of heat on PTB of different gestational ages (extreme, very, late, standard preterm births) and at-term births and 2) how mother and child characteristics (sex, ethnicity, parity, age, education, marital status, socioeconomic class) influence the association between heat and PTB.The analysis included all singleton births born in the warm season (5 warmer months) in 243 cities in 13 countries between 1979-2019. A two-stage design was applied with conditional quasi-Poisson regression with distributed lag nonlinear models to estimate the association between daily mean temperature and PTB or at-term birth (lags 0-4 days) in each location and for each category of characteristic of the mother and child. Then, a random-effects multilevel metaanalytical model was applied to report overall effects and by country level. Extreme heat effects were measured as the percentage change (ch%, 95%CI) in the outcome when the mean temperature increased from 1% to the 95% percentile.Heat was positively associated with all endpoints, except for extreme or very PTB whose risks were very imprecise, with larger risks for late-PTB (5%, 0.8-9.3) and smaller in at term births (2%, 1-3.1). Younger, Caucasian mothers and those with low socioeconomic class seemed to be more vulnerable to heat. Female fetal gender was associated with higher risk than males.This is the largest multi-location study assessing vulnerability patterns of heat-related PTB. It emphasises the need to integrate evidence from vulnerability assessments in designing public health interventions to face climate change effects.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.018 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.030 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".