Family Educational Attainment and Racial Disparities in Low Birth Weight

To evaluate the effect of grandmother and mother educational attainment on low birth weight (LBW) in children and grandchildren.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health is a multigenerational study that collected survey data from 1994 to 2018. Using this database, we constructed a cohort of 2867 non-Hispanic Black (NHB) and non-Hispanic White (NHW) grandmother-mother-grandchild triads to evaluate how education affects the likelihood of having LBW children and grandchildren, while adjusting for socioeconomic and maternal health factors using multivariable logistic regression.

Similar to previous studies, NHB women were more likely to have LBW descendants compared with NHW women in unadjusted and adjusted analyses. The prevalence of LBW descendants was lower in women with college education, regardless of race. Irrespective of race, mother and grandmother college education was associated with decreased odds of LBW children and grandchildren after adjusting for individual variables. When mother and grandmother education were examined together, and after adjusting for all individual, community, and health variables together, mother college education remained associated with lower odds of LBW (adjusted odds ratio, 0.58; 95% confidence interval, 0.44-0.77). There were no statistically significant differences in these effects between NHW and NHB populations.

Educational attainment in mothers is associated with decreased odds of LBW descendants after adjusting for multiple individual, community, and health covariates, regardless of race. Targeting improvements in education may ameliorate adverse pregnancy outcomes that disproportionately affect minority communities and cause significant lifelong consequences.