Ecological study demonstrates maternal mortality variations across countries are strongly linked to female education, indicating socioeconomic investments are vital for maternal health.
Key Points
To examine country-level associations between maternal mortality ratios, health risk factors, and socioeconomic indicators, evaluating whether socioeconomic metrics improve model predictive power.
Conducted a country-level ecological analysis utilizing 2019 data from the World Health Organization Global Health Observatory and the World Bank Open Data platform.
Analyzed natural logarithm-transformed maternal mortality ratios [ln(MMR)] across up to 151 countries using Pearson correlation and hierarchical regression in 102 countries with complete data.
The mean maternal mortality ratio was 126.11±185.90 per 100,000 live births, showing significant disparity across income levels with the highest rates in low-income countries.
Health risk factors accounted for an adjusted R² of 0.447 (44.7% variance), which expanded to an adjusted R² of 0.618 (61.8% variance) upon incorporating socioeconomic indicators.
Female secondary school enrollment displayed the strongest negative correlation with maternal mortality and remained the most prominent predictor in the final hierarchical model.