Preterm and Early Term Births Linked to Heat Waves in Eight US States, 1990-2017

A case-crossover study analyzing the acute relationship between heat waves and early births using high-resolution urban temperature data. The dataset includes 2,966,661 early term and 945,869 preterm births from May–September across eight US states, with data spanning from 1990 to 2017. It was created by Amy Fitch and published on figshare in 2026.

Use Cases

• Estimating odds ratios for preterm birth based on heat wave exposure in the 4 days preceding delivery.
• Analyzing geographic variation in heat wave impacts on early term births across eight US states.
• Modeling the relationship between urban heat island effects and birth outcomes using fine-scale temperature data.
• Conducting pooled meta-analyses of state-specific conditional logistic regression results.

Strengths

• Includes 2,966,661 early term and 945,869 preterm birth records.
• Covers a multi-decadal time range from as early as 1990 to 2017.
• Links birth records to high-resolution urban meteorology data (HUMID) at the zip code level.

Limitations

• Row count for the analytical dataset is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Births identified from statewide vital records and linked to daily mean temperatures from the High-resolution Urban Meteorology for Impacts Data set (HUMID).

Time Range

1990 to 2017 (May–September months).

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-04 18:41:54; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Eight US states: California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Nevada, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Oregon.