African ancestry and the threshold for preterm birth in French Guiana: impact of prematurity irrespective of ethnicity

Abstract

Introduction: in French Guiana, preterm birth has remained at 13% despite efforts to improve antenatal care. It has been hypothesized that this high preterm birth rate is partly explained by the fact that women of African descent naturally tend to deliver earlier than Caucasian women. Our aim was to test this hypothesis using birth registry data.