Identifying the most influential risk factors of frequent infant mortality in Iraq

Abstract

Nowadays, frequent Infant Mortality for the married women are prevailing in Iraq. It may be also considered as a risky phenomenon in developing countries. It is the loss of an infant after viability. The estimated number is 2.5 million deaths occurring in the first month of life in 2017 alone. On the other hand, the survival rates of newborn infants reflect the quality of pregnancy care provided during work and viability and the infrastructure for the infant care in the different regions and countries of the world. Numerous risk factors are causing this phenomenon. Logistic regression is a statistical technique can be used to express the association between the number of infant mortality and the risk factors cause it. It helps to select the most influential risk factors for this case. The aim of this study is to use logistic regression to examine the association between biological, behavioral and lifestyle risk factors and the number of infant mortality, and to identify the most influential risk factors affected it. A simple random sample is drawn with size of 200 persons that consists of all mothers who visit the primary health care centers in Babylon province in year 2018. Seventeen risk factors are representing biological, behavioral and lifestyle factors of women under the study. The results of fitting binary and ordinal logistic regressions with all seventeen risk factors show that four risk factors show a significance effect on the dependent variable. Consequently, a stepwise logistic regression was fitted, and ordinal logistic regression model has fitted. Nevertheless, there are no much differences between the results of these models with different methods of fitting. All results show that husbands working has two times more likely to exhibit infant mortality than Husbands not working. Increasing age at marriage and woman weight were associated with an increased likelihood of exhibiting infant mortality, but increasing number of hours of women's sleeping was associated with a reduction in the likelihood of exhibiting infant mortality.