Description
- Abstract:
- Background: Black women in the United States are three to four times more likely to experience a pregnancy-related death than white women, and infants born to Black women are dying at twice the rate of infants born to non-Hispanic white mothers. The racial disparities that we see in maternal and infant health cannot be explained away by factors such as poverty, access to care, physical health etc. Although Black women are more likely than white women to experience these risk factors, research shows that this does not fully account for the racial gap in outcomes. A growing body of research suggests that stress induced by discrimination plays a significant role in maternal and infant morbidity and mortality. This report aims to provide a comprehensive review of the literature surrounding the direct impact of race-related stress on adverse pregnancy outcomes, offer evidence based recommendations for interventions to eliminate this disparity, and present guidance for the direction of future research. Methods: Relevant articles published between 2008 and 2019 were obtained through an electronic database search. 2008 was chosen as the starting year for the search because of influential work demonstrating the importance of psychosocial factors that occur early in the life course for adverse pregnancy outcomes. In order to identify relevant research, a systematic search of the Google Scholar database was conducted crossing the keywords ‘racial discrimination’, ‘stress’ or ‘racism’ with the keywords ‘adverse pregnancy outcome’, ‘prematurity’, ‘low-birth weight’ and other similar derivatives. Titles and abstracts for all potentially relevant papers were reviewed and selected papers were followed up. English-language studies from the United States were included if: (1) The study population consisted of African American women only or African American women compared to white women (2) The study specifically mentions racism or racial discrimination in the abstract (3) Study objectives included examination of the relationship between race-related stress/exposure to racism and adverse pregnancy outcomes in Black women. (4) The study is of empirical nature (reviews were excluded). One reviewer extracted data and rated study quality. The search was stopped after page 10 due to failure to identify relevant articles after this page. A total of 10 studies were found to meet the inclusion criteria. Results: The results of this review revealed that while the majority of quantitative studies indicate a direct association between exposure to racism + resulting stress and adverse pregnancy outcomes, 3 out of the 8 studies only found such an association when in combination with an additional characteristic . None of the studies found no link at all between racism and adverse pregnancy outcomes, indicating that racial stress is likely an important component of racial disparities in adverse pregnancy outcomes. However, this factor alone cannot fully explain the disparity in pregnancy health outcomes. Conclusion: Disproportionately high numbers of pregnancies in Black women result in adverse outcomes. The psychosocial stress of racism likely contributes to this disparity. Evidence indicates that not
- Notes:
- Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2020
- Concentration: Public Health
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Citation
Singleton, Mikaila,
"Literature Review of Research on the Impact of Racism and Associated Race-Related Stress on Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes Among Black Women in the United States"
(2020).
Public Health Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/51em-yh30
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Public Health Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Public Health department....