A survey of neonatal births in the maternal departments in urban China 2005.

Objective: The authors studied the epidemiology of births in urban China.

Study Design: The authors conducted a retrospective study using data from the perinatal dataset of women delivering live births in 2005 at the maternity departments of 72 hospitals from 47 urban areas of 22 provinces in China.

Results: A total of 45,722 infants born from Jan 1, 2005 to Dec 31, 2005 were enrolled. (I) Male to female ratio was 1.13:1; (II) 8.1% of infants were born preterm; (III) The incidence of very low birth weight infants was 0.7%; (IV) A total of 99.7% of women delivering at term were naturally conceived and 0.3% had experienced assisted reproduction. Whereas 1.6% in women delivering preterm had assisted reproductive; (V) The total cesarean delivery rate was 49.2% compared to 50.8% of vaginal birth. Most cesarean delivery (38.1%) were due to social factors; (VI) Overall, 4.8% of infants had an Apgar of less than 7 at 1 minute, 1.6% less than 7 at 5 minutes; (VII) Of all the infants, 7.14% were admitted to neonatal units and death rate was 0.74% in all infants.

Conclusions: The proportion of preterm births was still higher in 2005 than that in 2002 and total caesarian delivery rate was much higher in urban China than that in America as well as most Asia countries.