Extreme heat, community resilience, and birth outcomes

• In Event: 20463 - Population Processes Across the Life Course

Abstract

As extreme heat events (EHE) have accelerated in intensity and frequency across the county in recent years, understanding their impact on infants in utero is particularly urgent. Assessing the potentially uneven impact of heat in a country whose neighborhoods were formed through racial and socioeconomic segregation is critical to addressing the intergenerational reproduction of disadvantage and inequality. This paper merges three large-scale datasets—21 million birth records from the National Vital Statistics from 2018 to 2023, a spatial-temporal catalog of extreme heat events, and the US Census Community Resilience Estimates—to examine the role of community resilience in the association between exposures to extreme heat during pregnancy and birth outcomes. We determined extreme heat exposures to births based on the births’ timing and the mothers’ resident county and used multivariate linear probability models with random effects to test the association between EHE exposure, community resilience, and their interaction. EHEs occurred more frequently throughout the 48 contiguous states during our study period. Cumulative exposures to EHEs early in the pregnancy (first trimester) were correlated with low birth weight and preterm births. The association between first-trimester exposures to EHEs and birth outcomes was greater among women who lived in neighborhoods with low resilience. Second-trimester exposures to EHE were also correlated with adverse birth outcomes but did not differ by the women’s neighborhood characteristics. Unlike prior studies that examined the acute effects of prolonged heat waves, we found that cumulative EHE exposures in the third trimester were not associated with birth outcomes.

Authors

• Heeju Sohn, Emory University

• Noreen Goldman, Princeton University