Abstract P359: Neighborhood Disinvestment and Racial/Ethnic Disparities in Peripartum Cardiomyopathy in California, From 2004-2019

Abstract

Introduction: Peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is a rare life-threatening medical condition presenting as idiopathic heart failure in late pregnancy or during the early postpartum period in otherwise healthy patients. Racial disparities in the rates of morbidity and mortality of PPCM have been extensively documented where higher rates occur in Black patients. There is minimal research examining the relationship between racial/ethnic disparities in PPCM and social determinants of health such as neighborhood social disadvantage. Hypothesis: We hypothesize that neighborhood social disadvantage is associated with PPCM and it contributes to racial/ethnic disparities in PPCM, pre-pregnancy hypertension contributes to disparities, and that the timing of PPCM mostly occurs during the postpartum period. Methods: We used data obtained from the California Department of Health Care Access and Information, which included vital records longitudinally linked with hospital discharge records for mothers and infants up to 9 months postpartum for births in California from 1997-2018. We created and standardized the Neighborhood Deprivation Index (NDI) as a proxy measure for neighborhood social disadvantage and categorized it into quartiles, with quartile 1 indicating the least deprivation and quartile 4 indicating the most deprivation. We examined the distribution of population characteristics for non-Hispanic White, non-Hispanic Black, non-Hispanic Asian and Hispanic births in the sample by PPCM status. We sequentially adjusted multivariable logistic regression models by maternal and clinical characteristics to estimate the association of NDI and race/ethnicity with PPCM using non-Hispanic White as the reference group. We report odds ratios (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) that reflect the total change in odds of PPCM, and calculated the timing of PPCM diagnosis. Results: Our study included 6,970,681 births and 862 (0.012%) PPCM cases. After adjustment, in the NDI regression models, quartile 2 (Q2) through quartile 4 (Q4) had elevated risk for PPCM (Q2: OR 1.2 (CI 1.0-1.5); Q3: OR 1.7 (CI 1.4-2.1); Q4: OR 1.5 (CI 1.2-1.9)). When adjusting for NDI in the race/ethnicity models, the odds of PPCM slightly decreased for each race/ethnicity. After adjusting for pre-pregnancy hypertension in both the NDI and race/ethnicity models, the odds of PPCM slightly decreased for quartile 3 and 4 and in NH Black births. Most PPCM cases (60.4%) were identified during a postpartum hospital encounter. Conclusions: Our results show that neighborhood deprivation and pre-pregnancy hypertension partially explain the racial/ethnic disparities in PPCM. Future research should examine the impact of specific measures of neighborhood deprivation (e.g., access to care, employment levels etc.) on the racial/ethnic disparity in outcomes such as PPCM.