Living in a dilapidated building-Risk Babies Born Premature

News Health Articles - Living in a dilapidated building-Risk Babies Born Premature. The house reflects the level of welfare of a family. Dilapidated house with a damaged environment will threaten the health of babies. Women who live in neighborhoods damaged by dilapidated buildings and a lot of damage likely to have premature babies or low birth weight.

Not yet known what the common thread between the urban environment with an unhealthy pregnancy.



However, as reported to the researchers in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, the strongest relationship observed in blacks, which has a 1.5 times greater risk of preterm delivery than white people.

"The African-Americans live in areas with building damage level of the most high. So in other words, this phenomenon could be constituted in part by the health disparities that we see," says researcher Daniel Kruger, evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan as reported by LiveScience, Thursday (12/15/2011).

Kruger and his colleagues are focusing on local Flint, Michigan, a city in the United States with a population of nearly 200,000 people during the car manufacturing in the 1970s. In 2010, the population is not more than 100,000 people with houses that made up the top and filled with buildings and factories.

Flint condition after the factories shut down operations is widely portrayed in the documentary by Michael Moore in 1989 titled 'Roger and Me' which focuses on urban decay after a General Motors plant there closed.

Using survey data of real estate and birth records from the Michigan Department of Public Health, the researchers looked for a relationship between the proportion of abandoned buildings and the proportion of premature infants or low birth weight. The researchers conducted a separate analysis between whites and blacks.

In the analysis of whites and blacks, the researchers found an association between poor environmental and new-born babies are less healthy. This relationship persisted even after the researchers controlled for parental education, insurance status, and socio-economic data available from birth records.

"There is a substantial relationship between the structure of a very dilapidated building with the number of babies with low birth weight and premature babies," said Kruger.

The worse the environment, the more closely the relationship between the dilapidation of buildings with low birth weight and premature birth. Because blacks in this study tended to live in the slums, they was the hardest hit by this effect.

Bad neighborhoods accounted for 30 percent of low birth weight rate and a 10 percent rate of preterm birth among black pregnant women.