Having an underweight and premature baby is linked to having encountered racial discrimination based on ethnicity, skin colour, or nationality, according to a pooled data analysis of the available evidence.
The research’s findings were disseminated in the journal “BMJ Global Health.”
According to the researchers, the study strengthens the body of evidence showing that racial discrimination increases the risk of negative health outcomes.
Race has been acknowledged as a social determinant of health and a risk factor for many diseases for a number of years. The evidence is mounting that upstream social, environmental, economic, and political factors are the primary causes of health inequities and that racism, not race, is frequently the underlying issue.
For instance, maternal mortality rates in the USA are 2-3 times higher for Black and Indigenous women than for White women. Similar disparities exist between Black and Asian women’s maternal mortality rates and White women’s maternal mortality rates in the UK.
The researchers searched eight electronic databases for pertinent studies on self-reported race discrimination and premature birth (before 37 weeks), low birth weight, and high blood pressure associated with pregnancy that had been published up to January 2022 in order to explore the patterns of racial disparities in pregnancy outcomes.
The final analysis included the findings from 24 studies overall, with an average of 39 to 9470 participants per study. The majority (20) of studies were conducted in
Participants in the study came from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, including Black or African Americans, Hispanics, non-Hispanic Whites, Maoris, Pacific Islanders, Asians, Aboriginals, Romanis, native Germans, and Turks.
The analysis of pooled data revealed that for all the outcomes examined, racial discrimination was linked to a higher risk of preterm birth and having a baby that was small for gestational age.
Premature birth rates were predicted to be 40% more common overall. The odds of premature birth were decreased but remained 31% higher when low-quality studies were excluded. And while not statistically significant, the overall odds of a small-for-gestational-age baby were estimated to be 23 per cent higher.
When additional analyses of a few chosen data were conducted, similar outcomes were attained.
The majority of the studies included in the pooled data analysis were based in the USA and included few other marginalised racial or ethnic groups besides African Americans. The researchers also acknowledge that many of the studies were of low quality. They might not therefore be more broadly applicable to other racial and cultural groups.
However, they note that their findings “align with existing evidence on perceived racial discrimination as an important risk factor for adverse pregnancy outcomes.”
They say: “Racism permeates people’s daily lives and has profound effects on the experiences of people who are racialized. It influences other social determinants of health like employment, poverty, education, and housing as an upstream factor.
The availability of services and resources, such as referrals to specialised care, access to health insurance, and use of public health services, can be impacted by racism, which is more directly related to health.
The researchers emphasise a number of strategies, including the necessity of bettering clinician training, to address how racism affects health outcomes.
They propose that this can be accomplished by “universally removing well-documented examples of racial bias that continue to perpetuate health inequities.”
This includes the absence of instruction on dermatology and the various disease manifestations in non-White people, the unreliability of pulse oximetry technology, unjustified racial adjustments to renal function measurement, and insufficient instruction on personal biases and the social causes of health inequities.
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