Health outcome · marker · measured in g
Birth weight
Part of: Birth outcomes
Also: birthweight, weight at birth, mean birth weight
The weight of a baby at birth, recorded in grams as a continuous measurement. Used this way it detects a shift across a whole population that the low-birth-weight threshold would hide, because most of the shift happens above the cut-off.
Why it matters indoors
The choice between a continuous weight and a threshold is a choice about what can be seen. An exposure that moves every baby down by a modest number of grams changes the mean measurably while shifting only a few individuals across the 2500 g line — so a study reporting low birth weight alone may find nothing while the same data reported as grams shows a clear effect.
That is why household combustion studies increasingly report both. The figures attributed to cooking with solid fuel during pregnancy are typically expressed as a difference in grams against clean-fuel households, and the same convention is used for tobacco smoke, where the effect on birth weight has been documented for decades.
Coridum records the difference in grams as printed, with the comparison group named, because a mean weight without its comparison carries no information at all.
Indoor factors with evidence
| Factor | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wood | difference 68 (-56–191) · borderline | pregnant women and their newborns · home | analysis inside RESPIRE, a randomised trial in rural Guatemala: pregnant women were given a chimney stove or kept an open fire, with 48-hour personal carbon monoxide measured in pregnancy and newborn birth weight measured within 48 hours of birth, adjusted for maternal height, gravidity, blood pressure and season | F-0978 Impact of Reduced Maternal Exposures to Wood Smoke from an I… (2011) | machine |
| Tobacco smoke (secondhand smoke) | mean 2703 | pregnant women and their newborns · home | communication from Sri Lanka: pregnant women's exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke and to wood-fuel smoke recorded by questionnaire, expired-air carbon monoxide measured with a breath monitor, and neonatal birth weight and gestational age recorded at delivery | F-0988 Pathirathna et al. Effects of Prenatal Tobacco and Wood-Fuel Smoke Exposure on … (2017) | machine |
| Tobacco smoke (secondhand smoke) | mean 3125 | pregnant women and their newborns · home | communication from Sri Lanka: pregnant women's exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke and to wood-fuel smoke recorded by questionnaire, expired-air carbon monoxide measured with a breath monitor, and neonatal birth weight and gestational age recorded at delivery | F-0989 Pathirathna et al. Effects of Prenatal Tobacco and Wood-Fuel Smoke Exposure on … (2017) | machine |
| Biomass fuel | difference 106.8 (-197.6–-16.0) | pregnant women and their newborns · home | cohort study of pregnant women in Sri Lanka: households grouped into high and low exposure by biomass fuel use, with indoor PM2.5 and carbon monoxide measured and neonatal outcomes recorded at birth | F-1011 Wickremasinghe et al. Effect of Biomass Fuel Use on Neonatal Outcomes: A Cohort St… (2025) | machine |
| Charcoal | difference 429 (259–599) | — · home | cohort study of pregnant women: the household cooking fuel and household garbage burning during pregnancy related to fetal growth and to low birth weight, against households using liquefied petroleum gas only | F-1694 Cooking fuel choices and garbage burning practices as determ… (2012) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Birth weight. Coridum Knowledge G-0154, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0154/