Kansas Health Institute | Information For Policy Makers. Health for Kansans.

TOPEKA — Back in 2000, 7.6 percent of the nation’s babies weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth.

Seven years later, 8.2 percent of the nation’s newborns met the low-birth weight criteria, making them above-average candidates for developmental problems or dying before their first birthdays.

“The number of low-birth weight babies has been going up for quite a while, for decades in fact,” said Laura Beavers, national coordinator for the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s annual KIDS COUNT report.

In Kansas, 6.9 percent of the state’s newborns were low-birth weight in 2000; 7.1 percent in 2007.

In 2007, 2,982 low-birth weight babies were born in Kansas; 333 babies died before their first birthday.

“This is an area of concern on both the national and state levels,” Beavers said. “But it’s also one that’s complicated by several factors.”

Chief among them, she said, are the advances in medical technologies that have increased survival rates.

“Low-birth weight babies are being born and kept alive now who wouldn’t have survived before,” Beavers said. “The other pieces are that during the 90s, there was an increase in multiple births and twins and triplets are more likely to be low-birth weight. And then some women are waiting longer to have babies, which, again, increase the chances for low-birth weight, as do fertility drugs.”

At the same time, Beavers said, the number of child bearing-age women living in or near poverty continues to increase, triggering a myriad of health issues.

“It’s difficult to say how each factor fits into the whole picture, but the economy appears to be the overriding factor,” Beavers said. “And it’s pretty clear that the economy has had a stagnating effect on the improvements we’ve been able to make over the last decade.”

Beavers noted that between 2000 and 2008, the percentage of children at or below the federal poverty level - $21,834 for a family of four – went from 17 percent to 18 percent.

“That additional 1 percent,” she said, “represents a million more kids in poverty in 2008 that weren’t there in 2000. And that’s a number that we don’t see coming back anytime soon because the 2008 numbers don’t really reflect the full impact of the recession. We’re expecting the 2009 figure to be 20 percent when it’s announced in the fall.”

The numbers of children in poverty are intertwined with those for low birth weight babies.

“Poor women have less access to prenatal care, which is certainly a factor in low birth weights and in infant mortality as well,” said Shannon Cotsoradis, chief executive of Kansas Action for Children.

In Kansas, the percentage of children living in poverty increased from 12 percent in 2000 to 15 percent in 2008.

“That’s a 25 percent increase – going from 12 to 15 percent. That’s very troubling,” Cotsoradis said. “That’s about 100,000 kids growing up in poverty.”

Aside from persistent downturns in the state’s economy, Cotsoradis said she couldn’t pinpoint other factors causing the increase.

The state’s child advocates, she said, are hoping that a Blue Ribbon Panel on Infant Mortality’s recommendations will improve the state’s infant mortality and low-birth weight numbers.

Earlier this year, legislators enacted a key recommendation, giving the Kansas Department of Health and Environment the statutory authority to interview mothers whose babies had died within a year of their births. The interviews will be voluntary.

“The first step was to come up with some recommendations. We’ve done that,” said Dr. Dennis Cooley, chairman of the panel. “The next step is going be going on the community level and finding out what are the factors involved in infant mortality, prematurity and low-birth weight and what can we as a community do to improve on the problem?”

The answers, he said, will need to be community based with a public health approach.

“I don’t think you can make one statewide program that’s going to cover everything,” he said. “The problems are too complex. And we can’t let ourselves see this as one group not having access or another group being exposed to high risk factors. Our approach is going to have to be a lot broader than that. It’s a public health issue.”

The 22-member panel’s next meeting is scheduled from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Friday at the Curtis State Office Building, Room 530, 1000 SW Jackson Topeka.