Sponsor
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development (ORD) partially funded the research with L.C.M. (contracts EP12D000264 and EP09D000003); J.S.J., and C.L.G. were supported in part by an appointment to the Internship/Research Participation Program at Office of Research and Development (NHEERL), U.S. EPA, administered by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education through an interagency agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. EPA.
Published In
Archives of Public Health
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2018
Subjects
Infant mortality -- Effect of environmental quality on, Environmental quality, Environmental health
Abstract
Background: The United States (U.S.) suffers from high infant mortality (IM) rates and there are significant racial/ethnic differences in these rates. Prior studies on the environment and infant mortality are generally limited to singular exposures. We utilize the Environmental Quality Index (EQI), a measure of cumulative environmental exposure (across air, water, land, sociodemographic, and land domains) for U.S. counties from 2000 to 2005, to investigate associations between ambient environment and IM across maternal race/ethnicity.
Methods: We linked 2000–2005 infant data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the EQI (n = 22,702,529; 144,741 deaths). We utilized multi-level regression to estimate associations between quartiles of county-level EQI and IM. We also considered associations between quartiles of county level domain specific indices with IM. We controlled for rural-urban status (RUCC1: urban, metropolitan; RUCC2: urban, non-metropolitan; RUCC3: less urbanized; RUCC4: thinly populated), maternal age, maternal education, marital status, infant sex, and stratified on race/ ethnicity. Additionally, we estimated associations for linear combinations of environmental quality and rural-urban status.
Results: We found a mix of positive, negative, and null associations and our findings varied across domain and race/ethnicity. Poorer overall environmental quality was associated with decreased odds among Non-Hispanic whites (OR and 95% CI: EQIQ4 (ref. EQIQ1): 0.84[0.80,0.89]). For Non-Hispanic blacks and Hispanics, some increased odds were observed. Poorer air quality was monotonically associated with increased odds among Non-Hispanic whites (airQ4 (ref. airQ1): 1.05[0.99,1.11]) and blacks (airQ4 (ref. airQ1): 1.09 [0.9,1.31]). Rural status was associated with increased IM odds among Hispanics (RUCC4-Q4:1.36[1.04,1.78]; RUCC1-Q4: 1.04[0.92,1.16], ref. for both RUCC1-Q1).
Conclusions: This study is the first to report on associations between ambient environmental quality and IM across the United States. It corroborates prior research suggesting an association between air pollution and IM and identifies residence in thinly populated (rural) areas as a potential risk factor towards IM amongst Hispanics. Some of the counterintuitive findings highlight the need for additional research into potentially differential drivers of environmental quality across the rural-urban continuum, especially with regards to the sociodemographic environment.
DOI
10.1186/s13690-018-0306-0
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/26689
Citation Details
Patel, A. P., Jagai, J. S., Messer, L. C., Gray, C. L., Rappazzo, K. M., Deflorio-Barker, S. A., & Lobdell, D. T. (2018). Associations between environmental quality and infant mortality in the United States, 2000–2005. Archives of Public Health, 76(1), 60.
Description
© The Author(s). 2018 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. 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.