Prematurity and low birth weight: geospatial analysis and recent trends

Prematurity and low birth weight are of concern in neonatal health. In this work, geospatial analysis was performed to identify the existence of statistically significant clusters of prematurity and low birth weight using Moran’s I. Data was obtained from March of Dimes and the National Center for Health Statistics for the years 2015 to 2019. Analysis demonstrated the presence of hotspot (High-High) and coldspot (Low-Low) geographic clusters of these variables in regions across the United States. Additionally, factorial ANOVA was performed, and revealed the significance of demographic variables of interest. Given the strong relationship between these two variables, regions that are hotspots for one variable, but not the other, are of particular interest for further study.