Population-level SDOH and Pediatric Asthma Health Care Utilization: A Systematic Review

Spatial analysis is a population health methodology that can determine geographic distributions of asthma outcomes and examine their relationship to place-based social determinants of health (SDOH).

To systematically review US-based studies analyzing associations between SDOH and asthma health care utilization by geographic entities.

Pubmed, Medline, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature.

Empirical, observational US-based studies were included if (1) outcomes included asthma-related emergency department visits or revisits, and hospitalizations or rehospitalizations; (2) exposures were ≥1 SDOH described by the Healthy People (HP) SDOH framework; (3) analysis occurred at the population-level using a geographic entity (eg, census-tract); (4) results were reported separately for children ≤18 years.

Two reviewers collected data on study information, demographics, geographic entities, SDOH exposures, and asthma outcomes. We used the HP SDOH framework's 5 domains to organize and synthesize study findings.

The initial search identified 815 studies; 40 met inclusion criteria. Zip-code tabulation areas (n = 16) and census-tracts (n = 9) were frequently used geographic entities. Ten SDOH were evaluated across all HP domains. Most studies (n = 37) found significant associations between ≥1 SDOH and asthma health care utilization. Poverty and environmental conditions were the most often studied SDOH. Eight SDOH-poverty, higher education enrollment, health care access, primary care access, discrimination, environmental conditions, housing quality, and crime - had consistent significant associations with asthma health care utilization.

Population-level SDOH are associated with asthma health care utilization when evaluated by geographic entities. Future work using similar methodology may improve this research's quality and utility.