Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review

Levels and Causes of Mortality under Age Five Years

Li Liu, Kenneth Hill, Shefali Oza, Dan Hogan, Yue Chu, Simon Cousens, Colin Mathers, Cynthia Stanton, Joy Lawn, Black E Robert
Robert E Black, Ramanan Laxminarayan, Marleen Temmerman, Neff Walker
, editors.
In: Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health: Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (Volume 2). Washington (DC): The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank; 2016 Apr 5. Chapter 4.
Free Books & Documents
Review

Levels and Causes of Mortality under Age Five Years

Li Liu et al.
Free Books & Documents

Excerpt

This chapter reviews recent estimates of levels and distributions by cause of death of children under age five years, including stillbirths. We focus on 2000–15 and present results by World Bank region. We introduce an innovation by including information on stillbirths, defined as deaths from the 28th week of gestation. The standard convention has been to use live birth as the starting point of risk measurement, as in Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG 4) to reduce mortality under age five years by two-thirds from 1990 to 2015 (UN 2000). However, substantial proportions of stillbirths are preventable given adequate obstetric care, and would, if prevented, increase the number of live births. We argue that including stillbirths in summary measures of child mortality provides a more inclusive assessment of health service provision than the standard convention.

Data on levels and trends of mortality before age five years are taken from the 2015 report by the United Nations Inter-Agency Group on Mortality Estimation (IGME) (You and others 2015). Data on levels and trends of causes of mortality under age five years are taken from the latest estimates produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF’s (United Nations Children’s Fund) Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group (Liu and others, forthcoming).

PubMed Disclaimer

References

    1. Aggarwal A K, Jain V, Kumar R. 2011. “Validity of Verbal Autopsy for Ascertaining the Causes of Stillbirth.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 89 (1): 31–40. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Alkema L, New J R, Pedersen J, You D. 2014. “Child Mortality Estimation 2013: An Overview of Updates in Estimation Methods by the United Nations Inter-Agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation.” PLoS One 9 (7): e101112. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0101112. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Anker M. 1997. “The Effect of Misclassification Error on Reported Cause-Specific Mortality Fractions from Verbal Autopsy.” International Journal of Epidemiology 26 (5): 1090–96. - PubMed
    1. Bhutta Z A, Ahmed T, Black R E, Cousens S, Dewey K, and others. 2008. “What Works? Interventions for Maternal and Child Undernutrition and Survival.” The Lancet 371 (9610): 417–40. - PubMed
    1. Bhutta Z A, Das J K, Bahl R, Lawn J E, Salam R A, and others. 2014. “Can Available Interventions End Preventable Deaths in Mothers, Newborn Babies, and Stillbirths, and at What Cost?” The Lancet 384 (9940): 347–70. - PubMed

LinkOut - more resources