Racism May Cause Low Birth Weights
The report will be published in the American Journal of Public Health. The report's lead author, Richard David, suggests that researchers are wasting their time looking for a "pre-term birth gene" according to a press release.
In the study, David and his co-author James Collins Jr., a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University compared the birth weights of infants in three distinct groups: African American, Africans who lived in Illinois, and whites. It is estimated that most African Americans are only 70 percent to 75 percent of direct African descent.
"If there were such a thing as a (pre-term birth) gene, you would expect the African women to have the lowest birth weights," David said in a press release. "But the African and white women were virtually identical," with significantly higher birth weights than the African-American women, he concluded.
David concluded that it was something about living in American that affected the infant's birth rate. Another fact that made David conclude there was not a genetic cause is the fact that African American children rate highest in all major causes of death within the first year of life.
"Genetic diseases pop up at random in different (racial) populations," David said. "But one group is taking all the hits. If this were a genetic problem it wouldn't fit that pattern," he concluded.
The birth weights that David studied also varied with population and generation differences. This is at odds with genetic shifts, which occur over thousands of years. African American women, however, are at high risks for conditions such as preeclampsia and high blood pressure.
The researchers also found that African American women are under great stress from perceived discrimination. In the study, African American participants were interviewed who had normal weight babies and compared with those African Americans who had low birth weight babies.
David and Collins asked if the participants felt they had been discriminated against when looking for work, in an educational setting, or another situation. They found that participants that felt they had discriminated against had two times the chance of giving birth to a low birth weight baby. Those that felt they had been discriminated in all places had three times the chance of giving birth to a low weight baby.
SOURCES:
University of Illinois at Chicago, "Disparities in Infant Mortality Not Related to Race." Newswire. URL: (http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/531986/)
Published by Kay Jones
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