A BIRTH-WEIGHT ADJUSTED COMPARISON OF PERINATAL-MORTALITY IN THE FAROE ISLANDS AND DENMARK

The objectives were to compare perinatal mortality (PNM) in the Faroes and Denmark while accounting for the high birth weights in the Faroes , and to discuss methodological aspects related to this task. We appli ed conventional methods employing absolute birth weight standards, and the Wilcox-Russell way of comparing relative birth weights. During 19 77-85 perinatal mortality (PNM) in the Faroes was 14.7 (98 cases) per 1000 births, and 1.57 times higher than that in Denmark. Conventional method: birth weight-standardised risk ratio for PNM in the Faroes v D enmark was 1.95; the risk ratio declined with increasing birth weight. Wilcox-Russell model: the risk tended to be more uniformly increased across the birth weight distribution when babies with same relative bi rth weights were compared; the residual component of the birth weight distribution (i.e. the excess of observed births in the lower tail bey ond what could be predicted by a Gaussian distribution) was 2.1% in th e Faroes and 3.6% in Denmark, which does not fit with the model assump tion that the size of the residual component is a strong determinant o f a population's PNM.