Southern Children Face Higher Health Risks

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Children living in the South are up to three times more likely to battle poor health and its consequences — including obesity, teen pregnancy and death — than those in all other regions of the United States, even if they receive the same medical care, a new study reveals.

“Hurricane Katrina gave the world a glimpse of the disparities in the South,” says Dr. Jeffrey Goldhagen, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of community pediatrics at the UF College of Medicine — Jacksonville. “Our research documents just how profoundly these disparities impact the health of children in the region.”

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to statistically relate region of residence to measures of child health, Goldhagen says.

“In fact, we now believe that where a child lives may be one of the most powerful predictors of child health outcomes and disparities,” he says.

The poor health outcomes researchers documented included low birthweight, teen pregnancy, death and other problems such as mental illness, asthma, obesity, tooth decay and school performance.

Researchers computed a Child Health Index that ranked each state in the nation according to five routine indicators of physical health in children — percentage of low-birthweight infants, infant mortality rate, child death rate, teen death rate and teen birth rates. The scores revealed that eight of the 10 states with the poorest child health outcomes in the nation — Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina — are in what the researchers defined as the Deep South. The remaining Deep South states, Kentucky and Florida, are in the lowest quarter.

Living in the Deep South proved to be the best predictor of poor child health outcomes, more than any other factor commonly used to describe health differences among groups of children, including poverty, parents’ employment status or single-parent households.

“We weren’t really surprised by the results because I think most people thought this might be the case,” says co-author William Livingood, a UF associate professor of pediatrics and director of the Duval County Health Department’s Institute for Health, Policy and Evaluation Research. “But we were able to apply epidemiological principles to assess, clarify and map the problem and then document this intuitive feeling by making it scientific and evidence-based.”

Jeffrey Goldhagen, jeffrey.goldhagen@jax.ufl.edu
Patricia Bates McGhee