Published In
Environmental Health
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-9-2015
Subjects
Environmental health -- Social aspects -- United States, Premature infants -- United States
Abstract
Background: Many environmental factors have been independently associated with preterm birth (PTB). However, exposure is not isolated to a single environmental factor, but rather to many positive and negative factors that co-occur. The environmental quality index (EQI), a measure of cumulative environmental exposure across all US counties from 2000—2005, was used to investigate associations between ambient environment and PTB.
Methods: With 2000–2005 birth data from the National Center for Health Statistics for the United States (n = 24,483,348), we estimated the association between increasing quintiles of the EQI and county-level and individual-level PTB; we also considered environmental domain-specific (air, water, land, sociodemographic and built environment) and urban–rural stratifications.
Results: Effect estimates for the relationship between environmental quality and PTB varied by domain and by urban– rural strata but were consistent across county- and individual-level analyses. The county-level prevalence difference (PD (95 % confidence interval) for the non-stratified EQI comparing the highest quintile (poorest environmental quality) to the lowest quintile (best environmental quality) was −0.0166 (−0.0198, −0.0134). The air and sociodemographic domains had the strongest associations with PTB; PDs were 0.0196 (0.0162, 0.0229) and −0.0262 (−0.0300, −0.0224) for the air and sociodemographic domain indices, respectively. Within the most urban strata, the PD for the sociodemographic domain index was 0.0256 (0.0205, 0.0307). Odds ratios (OR) for the individual-level analysis were congruent with PDs.
Conclusion: We observed both strong positive and negative associations between measures of broad environmental quality and preterm birth. Associations differed by rural–urban stratum and by the five environmental domains. Our study demonstrates the use of a large scale composite environment exposure metric with preterm birth, an important indicator of population health and shows potential for future research.
DOI
10.1186/s12940-015-0038-3
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/15603
Citation Details
Rappazzo, K. M., Messer, L. C., Jagai, J. S., Gray, C. L., Grabich, S. C., & Lobdell, D. T. (2015). The associations between environmental quality and preterm birth in the United States, 2000–2005: a cross-sectional analysis. Environmental Health, 14(1), 50.
Included in
Community Health Commons, Environmental Health Commons, Environmental Public Health Commons, Maternal and Child Health Commons
Description
Copyright 2015 Rappazzo et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.