In Reply.—First, we would like to thank Dr Pasamanick for bringing his interesting data on the relationship of injuries in school-aged children and birth weight to our attention. We had not previously been aware of these data.
We are aware of the potential biases caused by response rates and recall that may occur when relying on survey techniques. However, as we have previously noted,1 an examination of the distribution for several variables on the birth certificate between respondents and nonrespondents disclosed few differences. Furthermore, as we noted in our article in the Journal (1981;135:159-163), while retrospective recall may present problems, the effect would most likely be seen in an underestimate of the frequency of injuries in this age group, and the degree to which this might be occurring remains to be established. More importantly, however, we have no evidence that such recall is related to birth weight; this