Spatial Patterns Associating Low Birth Weight with Environmental and Behavioral Factors

Abstract

Low birth weight (LBW) is a significant public health problem in the world. It was estimated globally by the World Health Organization (WHO) that prevalence of LBW was 15% of all births. In Murung Raya district LBW cases remain high. This paper aimed to identify and discuss the relationship between environmental risk factors with LBW in Murung Raya.A spatial analysis was conducted with 150 women as the total participantswho were recruited through the incidence data in 2013-2014. The questionnaires, medical records, and geographic data were measured by Stata software, ArcGis, SatScan, and Geoda. The study results indicated there was significant correlation between health behavior and environmental variables with the strength of external neighborhood effect across LBW risk factors. More intense clustering of high values (hot spots) was found through the spatial analysis showing that most of the cases were located near the defined buffer zone. This research demonstrates that the spatial pattern analysis provided greater statistical power to detect an effect that was not apparent in the previous epidemiology studies.