About this Research Topic

Background

While the majority of newborns are born healthy at term gestational age, with the advancement of medical/surgical interventions in neonatal care, many newborns have complex disorders at birth with the potential for long-term neuro-developmental deficits. These are seen in the increased survival of pre-term infants with associated complications of pre-term birth as well as term infants with congenital medical and surgical disorders. There is some growing evidence that variations in neonatal outcomes cannot be solely explained by the illness severity and clinical interventions. There are additional factors in play that can potentially have a negative impact and identifying some modifiable risk factors could help in mitigating the inequities in outcomes. Also, knowing well that race is a social construct, it is very commonly reported in ongoing studies and can lead to biases in care provision.

Currently, there is a limited body of literature highlighting the influences of neonatal sex, race(ism), and maternal Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) on neonatal outcomes. It is a common adage in pediatrics that male infants will have a relatively poor outcome compared to female infants - but the "why" is still unanswered. Historically, race has been tied in with health outcomes sending an erroneous message with a huge impact on care provision to people of color and minorities. Lastly, disparities in accessing healthcare based on one's socioeconomic status and the neighborhood one lives in are documented for adults and children. We would like to identify the scientific rationale about the role infant sex plays; how we can eliminate race(ism) as influencing outcomes and how we can effectively address SDoH-related modifiable factors by early identification and creating public health policies to support the families and newborns affected by it.

We would like to invite original research as well as review articles focusing on these 3 factors - sex, race(ism) as well as SDoH. These could be either focus on the existing evidence or well-thought-out pieces on how to best identify/address both the modifiable (SDoH) as well as non-modifiable [sex, race(ism)] factors in the context of outcomes for infants at high risk. Advocacy pieces as well as possible public health policy pieces would be also welcomed.

Keywords: sex, race, neonatal outcomes, maternal social risks

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