Two decades of change: Cot deaths and birth score items in Canterbury, New Zealand

Abstract

The individual items of two birth scores and the scores themselves were examined for a sample of 2065 mothers and infants pairs for any changes between 1968 and 1986. About 100 births were randomly sampled for each year. The scoring systems used were the Sheffield risk score and the Christchurch-Invercargill-Dunedin score. A total of eight items from these scores was examined. The purpose was to discover whether the increasing cot death rate in Canterbury could be attributed to an increasing proportion of vulnerable infants, as determined by the items in the risk scores. No such relationship was uniformly found.