General Obstetrics and Gynecology: ObstetricsIncreased risk of adverse pregnancy outcome among Somali immigrants in Washington state
Section snippets
Material and methods
The Institutional Review Board of the University of Washington approved this population-based retrospective cohort study. The Birth Events Records Database (BERD), which links birth certificate data with the birth hospitalization discharge data for both the mother and child for all nonfederal hospitals in Washington state, was utilized. BERD contains information from the birth certificate about the pregnancy, delivery, infant status, demographic characteristics, and adverse maternal and
Results
Two hundred sixty-six Somali women, 151 US-born black women, and 86 US-born white women had more than 1 singleton birth during the study period and information from these 503 pregnancies were excluded from the analysis. After these exclusions, the cohort included 579 singleton births to Somali women, 2384 singleton births to US-born blacks, and 2453 singleton births to US-born whites.
Somali deliveries from 1993 to 2001 in Washington state were almost exclusively confined to urban areas in and
Comment
Pregnancy complications and obstetric and neonatal outcomes are usually described within the context of broad racial and ethnic categories: white, black, Asian, Native American and Pacific Islander.2 Our study underscores the importance of evaluating outcomes by ethnically and culturally unique groups. Our findings demonstrate a clear difference, and poorer outcomes, between women who were born in Somalia compared with US-born black or white women.
Others1 have compared perinatal complications
Acknowledgments
We appreciate the assistance of Bill O'Brian in the data preparation for statistical analysis; Beth Mueller in study design; and Michael Neufeld in reviewing neonatal outcome analysis.
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Cited by (0)
Funding provided by Center of Excellence in Women's Health, DHHS grant no. 213-98-0016.
Reprints not available from the authors.