At 21:33 27/04/05 +0100, Ray Thomas wrote (in small part):
>One cannot of course say QED about this line of argument. But like all the
>best hypotheses it can be disproved. It would be disproved if there were
>no increase in the average of age of primiparous mothers between 2002 and
>2003.
Even that would not go very far to answering the broader question about
that last 2-3 decades. It is inevitable that multiple factors, each with
their own patterns of long-term change and year-to-year variability, are
implicated in the rise of Caesarian Section ('CS') rate - so even an
absence of such an increase in maternal age from 2002 to 2003 would not
preclude the possibility that a substantial proportion of the increase in
CS rate during the preceding 2-3 decades had been due to changes in
maternal age.
.... or, to introduce some 'statistics', with the SD of year-to-year
increases over the past 15 years being about 0.38%, and no information
about some of the other variables, one has to be pretty cautious about
placing ANY interpretation, relating to causality or anything else, on the
2002/3 increase in CS rate of only 0.7%
>Can anyone dig out those statistics?
We know that information on such matters as maternal age are currently
collected, can suspect that that they always have been, and can probably
assume that all this data still exists somewhere. It would be interesting
to know who has made the decision not to publish this data (along with the
other maternity statistics) for most years, and why. Since statistics
regarding such issues as 'day of week' for CS and maternal ethnic origin
are published regularly, one wonders whether there is somewhat of an
'agenda' at work, rather than a simple objective publication of all of the
available statistics.
Kind Regards,
John
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