Background: Congenital heart disease (CHD) affects thousands of newborns each year in the United States (US). Infants born with CHD have an increased risk of adverse health outcomes compared to healthy infants. These outcomes include, but are not limited to, neurodevelopmental, surgical, and mortality-related outcomes. Previous US-based research has explored how sociodemographic factors may impact these health outcomes in infants with CHD; however, their impact on the risk of CHD is unclear. This study aims to explore the sociodemographic profile related to CHD to help address health disparities that arise from race and social determinants of health. Defining the sociodemographic factors associated with CHD will encourage policy change and the implementation of preventative measures.
Methods: This study is a secondary analysis of longitudinally collected data. We compared infants with CHD and healthy controls. We used a questionnaire to collect sociodemographic data. Pearson's chi-square test/Fisher's exact tests analyzed the associations among different sociodemographic factors between infants with CHD and healthy controls.
Results: We obtained sociodemographic factors from 30 healthy control infants and 39 infants with CHD. We found a statistically significant difference in maternal education between our 2 groups of infants (p=0.004).
Conclusion: Maternal education is associated with CHD. Future studies are needed to further characterize sociodemographic factors that may predict and impact the risk of CHD and to determine possible interventions that may help decrease health disparities regarding the risk of CHD.
Keywords: congenital heart defects; infants; maternal education; social determinants of health; sociodemographic.