Background
PERINATAL MORBIDITY
Pediatricians, obstetricians, and public health workers have become accustomed to using fetal growth curves to assess risk for perinatal morbidity and mortality. The widespread use of obstetrical ultrasound early in gestation, particularly within high-income settings, has allowed very accurate and precise estimation of gestational age [While early prenatal ultrasound is common in high resource countries, it is less common or even nonexistent in low resource settings. This has made the development of fetal growth curves difficult in these settings. Growing access to low-cost ultrasound (US) devices in these settings may begin to increase access to antenatal sonography for populations in low-to-middle income countries [The Global Network for Women’s and Children’s Health Research recently completed a multi-site global clinical trial of low dose aspirin administered to women throughout pregnancy, beginning between 6–14 weeks gestation [One of the largest, most comprehensive set of studies on multinational birth weight are those of the INTERGROWTH-21st trial [