Low Birth Weight.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), infants who weigh less than 2,500 grams (5.5 pounds) at birth are considered to be of low birth weight (LBW). A 2004 joint study by WHO and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 15.5 percent of all babies born around the world were LBW, with a range of 3.3 percent to 38 percent. By 2010, that rate had changed only slightly despite concentrated global efforts to reduce such incidences. In fact, LBW rates continued to rise in many countries, including the United States. In 2013, approximately 8 percent of babies in the United States were born with low birth weight, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. LBW infants are twenty times more like than other infants to die in their first year of life and have a 50 percent higher chance of experiencing developmental problems. LBW also places infants at risk for developing vision and hearing problems and chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease later in life. The total number of low-birth-weight infants may be even higher than reported because approximately half of all newborns are not weighed within the first hour of their births. Approximately 95.6 percent of all LBW infants are born in developing countries, reflecting the overall pattern of health risks that are endemic in the world’s poorest regions. Those births are highly associated with preterm births, which occur before thirty-seven weeks of gestation.