The infant mortality rate, a key indicator of the health of a population, has rebounded sharply in France since 2012, noted Tuesday a study whose authors consider it "essential" to understand the causes of this increase.
"We were among the best students for a long time, then the trend has changed since 2005 and it goes back from 2012 to 2019", explains Martin Chalumeau, pediatrician and epidemiologist, who supervised this study, published in the journal
The Lancet Regional Health .
-Europe
.
Researchers from Inserm, the University of Paris, AP-HP and Nantes University Hospital, in collaboration with teams from the University of California, analyzed civil status data from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) between 2001 and 2019. Their results show that during this study period, 53,077 deaths of infants under the age of one were recorded among the 14,622. 096 live births, i.e. an average infant mortality rate of 3.63 per 1,000 (4.00 for boys, 3.25 for girls).
Very worrying figures
Nearly a quarter of deaths (24.4%) occurred during the first day of life and half (47.8%) during the early neonatal period, ie during the first week after birth.
Above all, if the infant mortality rate fell sharply from 2001 to 2005, then more slowly from 2005 to 2012, this rate then rebounded sharply.
This increase took infant mortality from 3.32 in 2012 to 3.56 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2019 (+7%).
“If we had the mortality rate of Sweden or Finland, there would be 1,200 fewer deaths each year of children under one year old”, compares Martin Chalumeau.
Hence the importance, according to him, of exploring in detail the causes of this increase: because for the moment, "it is not a public health priority despite figures which are very worrying", regrets he.
Several tracks
The authors of the study are content to put forward a few hypotheses to explain this increase.
They recall in particular that the main risk factors for early death are linked to prematurity and the presence of congenital anomalies, and that these factors are in turn affected by maternal health before and during pregnancy, and by socio-economic factors. economic.
Regarding maternal health before and during pregnancy, the French national perinatal surveys revealed that maternal age, body mass index and smoking during pregnancy increased steadily over the study period, they point out.
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