Cohort profile: the 1993 Pelotas (Brazil) birth cohort study.

Pelotas is a city in the extreme south of Brazil, near the border of Uruguay, with 214 000 urban inhabitants in 1982. At the time, we were assistant professors, each working in one of the two medical schools in the city, and both undergoing post-graduate training at the University of London. We were inspired by the findings of the British perinatal study, and one of us (FCB) decided to do a similar study for his doctoral thesis. The lack of reliable data on perinatal mortality in Brazil, due to poor registration of births and deaths—particularly stillbirths— justified the launch of the study. Funding from the International Development Research Center (Canada) was obtained for the perinatal survey, which led to FCB’s PhD thesis. 1,2