International migration and adverse birth outcomes: role of ethnicity, region of origin and destination
OPEN ACCESS- Marcelo Luis Urquia1,
- Richard Henry Glazier2,
- Beatrice Blondel3,
- Jennifer Zeitlin3,
- Mika Gissler4,
- Alison Macfarlane5,
- Edward Ng6,
- Maureen Heaman7,
- Babill Stray-Pedersen8,
- Anita J Gagnon9,
- for the ROAM collaboration*
- 1Centre for Research on Inner City Health, St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Canada
- 2Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto, Canada
- 3Epidemiological Research Unit on Perinatal Health and Women's Health (INSERM), Paris, France
- 4National Research and Development Centre for Welfare and Health (STAKES), Helsinki, Finland
- 5City University, London, UK
- 6Statistics Canada, Ottawa, Canada
- 7Faculty of Nursing, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
- 8University of Oslo, Rikshospitalet, Oslo, Norway
- 9McGill University/MUHC, Montreal, Canada
- Correspondence to Dr Marcelo Luis Urquia, Centre for Research on Inner City Health, St Michael's Hospital, 70 Richmond Street E, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON M5C 1N8, Canada; marcelo.urquia{at}utoronto.ca
- Accepted 16 May 2009
- Published Online First 19 August 2009
Abstract
Background The literature on international migration and birth outcomes shows mixed results. This study examined whether low birth weight (LBW) and preterm birth differed between non-migrants and migrant subgroups, defined by race/ethnicity and world region of origin and destination.
Methods A systematic review and meta-regression analyses were conducted using three-level logistic models to account for the heterogeneity between studies and between subgroups within studies.
Results Twenty-four studies, involving more than 30 million singleton births, met the inclusion criteria. Compared with US-born black women, black migrant women were at lower odds of delivering LBW and preterm birth babies. Hispanic migrants also exhibited lower odds for these outcomes, but Asian and white migrants did not. Sub-Saharan African and Latin-American and Caribbean women were at higher odds of delivering LBW babies in Europe but not in the USA and south-central Asians were at higher odds in both continents, compared with the native-born populations.
Conclusions The association between migration and adverse birth outcomes varies by migrant subgroup and it is sensitive to the definition of the migrant and reference groups.
- ethnicity
- low birth weight
- meta-analysis ME
- migration and health
- multilevel modelling
- perinatal CG
- preterm birth
Footnotes
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↵* See end of paper for members of the ROAM collaboration.
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Funding This work was partly funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) under their International Opportunities Program (157033 to AG) with start-up support from Immigration et métropoles (Center of Excellence in Immigration Studies, Montreal), and by personal research grant (CIHRIOP-44972 to MU) of Dr John Frank, Scientific Director of the Institute of Population and Public Health of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Le fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec (FRSQ) provided career support and l'Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM; France), a visiting scientist scholarship (to AG).
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Competing interests None.
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Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
