Global Age Patterns of Under-Five Mortality (GAPU5M) project

Project Summary

The Under-5 Mortality Rate (U5MR) is a key and widely-used indicator of child health, but it conceals important information about how this mortality is distributed by age. For better understanding and monitoring of child health, it is critical to examine how the risk of death varies within the 0-5 age range. This includes age breakdowns beyond the standard cut-off points of 28 days (for neonatal mortality) and 1 year (for infant mortality).

The goal of this project is to improve our understanding of age patterns of under-5 mortality by gathering the largest database to date on high-quality global mortality information by detailed age (by days, weeks, months, and years of age) from birth until age 5, by sex. This database, which will cover a wide array of historical and contemporary contexts in both more- and less-developed settings, will serve as a basis for generating models summarizing regularities about how under-5 mortality is distributed by detailed age in human populations. These models will then be used for evaluating and correcting under-5 mortality information by detailed age in less-developed countries.

Funding

The Global Age Patterns of Under-Five Mortality (GAPU5M) project is funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health (NICHD).