Skip to main content

Birthing in better hospitals could save lives of Black, Native mothers

Birthing in better hospitals could save lives of Black, Native mothers

A new study from researchers at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Stanford University School of Medicine has determined that higher severe maternal morbidity rates for Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, and mixed-race women may be reduced if they had delivered in the same hospitals as non-Hispanic White women.

Researchers specifically targeted severe maternal morbidity (SMM), an umbrella term for a set of 21 adverse health complications including eclampsia and heart failure that can occur during childbirth. SMM has emerged as a growing public health crisis. The CDC reports that “the overall rate of SMM increased almost 200%” between 1993 and 2014, with Black women experiencing these outcomes at 2-3 times the rate of White women. The factors explaining the sharp increase in SMM nationally, as well as the persistent disparities by race and ethnicity, are inadequately understood, leaving few options to prevent short- and long-term health consequences for women and their newborns.

The researchers reviewed more than 3 million California birth records from 2007-2012 to see if hospital-level factors (such as teaching affiliation and proportion of SMM deliveries) could explain racial disparities in maternal outcomes related to giving birth.

“We found that the prevalence of SMM in California was highest in Black women and double that of White women (2.1% vs. 1.1%), a disparity that we know is increasing over time based on prior research by our team. We hypothesized that birth hospital might be an important underlying contributor to these disparities, given that national data suggests that Black women tend to deliver at hospitals that have worse outcomes,” said Mahasin Mujahid, lead author of a paper published in August in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and associate professor of epidemiology and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Health at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

Mujahid’s research found 33% of White women delivered in hospitals with the highest tertile of SMM rates compared to 53% of Black women. “Our model found that if Black women gave birth at the same distribution of hospitals as White women, this would have resulted in 156 fewer cases of SMM in Black women, representing a 7.8% reduction in the Black-White disparity,” Mujahid said.

The findings highlight the critical need for more research on the potential role of structural racism in shaping differential access to high quality hospitals based on race and ethnicity and in determining the within-hospital experiences of minoritized women such as experiences of discrimination that may disproportionately affect their birth experiences.

“We are in the midst of a national reckoning on the impacts of structural racism on Black Americans,” said Mujahid. “It is imperative that we include the health disparities experienced by historically marginalized women. SMM is one of a number of health problems that disproportionately affect racially and ethnically minoritized women, with particularly devastating consequences for Black and Native American women. More work is urgently needed to uncover the systemic factors that produce these disparities and to develop targeted interventions that promote health equity.”

https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(20)30845-0/pdf



from ScienceBlog.com https://ift.tt/3if95RF
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wiggling worms suggest link between vitamin B12 and Alzheimer’s

Worms don’t wiggle when they have Alzheimer’s disease. Yet something helped worms with the disease hold onto their wiggle in Professor Jessica Tanis’s lab at the University of Delaware. In solving the mystery, Tanis and her team have yielded new clues into the potential impact of diet on Alzheimer’s, the dreaded degenerative brain disease afflicting more than 6 million Americans. A few years ago, Tanis and her team began investigating factors affecting the onset and progression of Alzheimer’s disease. They were doing genetic research with  C. elegans , a tiny soil-dwelling worm that is the subject of numerous studies. Expression of amyloid beta, a toxic protein implicated in Alzheimer’s disease, paralyzes worms within 36 hours after they reach adulthood. While the worms in one petri dish in Tanis’s lab were rendered completely immobile, the worms of the same age in the adjacent petri dish still had their wiggle, documented as “body bends,” by the scientists. “It was an observa...
Post a Comment
Read more

‘Massive-scale mobilization’ necessary for addressing climate change, scientists say

A year after a global coalition of more than 11,000 scientists declared a climate emergency, Oregon State University researchers who initiated the declaration released an update today that points to a handful of hopeful signs, but shares continued alarm regarding an overall lack of progress in addressing climate risks. “Young people in more than 3,500 locations around the world have organized to push for urgent action,” said Oregon State University’s William Ripple, who co-authored “The Climate Emergency: 2020 in Review,” published today in Scientific American. “And the Black Lives Matter movement has elevated social injustice and equality to the top of our consciousness. “Rapid progress in each of the climate action steps we outline is possible if framed from the outset in the context of climate justice – climate change is a deeply moral issue. We desperately need those who face the most severe climate risks to help shape the response.” One year ago, Ripple, distinguished profess...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ancient Shell Sounds

Abandoned at the mouth of your shelter you quivered apprehensively at our approach, crying out to be held as we proclaimed the exception of your discovery. Sighing wearily as we consigned you to the dusty silence of our archives. But now When I hold you in my hands, I see the face of your purposefully speckled complexion. When I lift you to my ear, I hear the sound of an ancient sea lapping at your shores. When I place you at my lips, I feel the heartbeat of your creator pulsing to my breath. I close my eyes, as you call out to all that you have lost. The shell that was recovered from the Marsoulas cave in the Pyrenees of France (Image Credit: C. Fritz, Muséum d’Histoire naturelle de Toulouse). This poem is inspired by recent research , which has discovered that a large seashell that sat in a French museum for decades is actually a musical instrument used around 18,000 years ago. In 1931, researchers working in southern France unearthed a large seashell at the entr...
Post a Comment
Read more