A little context: a scary trend taken a closer look.
Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and Richmond Children’s Hospital previously revealed that mortality rates among children and adolescents increased by 18% between 2019 and 2021. Injury-related deaths increased so spectacularly that they had eclipsed all advances in public health.
The group, seeking to delve further into this worrying trend, obtained data on death certificates from the public from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. MARVEILLE database and stratified it by race, ethnicity, and cause for children aged 1 to 19 years. They found that black and American Indian/Alaska Native children were not only dying at significantly higher rates than white children, but that disparities — which had been improving through 2013 — were widening.
The data also found that while child mortality rates overall worsened around 2020, rates for Black, Native American and Hispanic children had started increasing much earlier, around 2014.
Between 2014 and 2020, mortality rates for black children and adolescents increased by about 37 percent, and those of Native American youth by about 22 percent, compared to less than 5 percent for white youth.
“We knew we would find disparities, but certainly not this large,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of family medicine at the VCU School of Medicine who worked on the research. “We were shocked.”
The numbers: Injuries, particularly those caused by firearms, are at the root of the disparities.
Racial and ethnic disparities were more pronounced when injuries were isolated from other causes of death. For example, the rate of deaths of black children by homicide is 10 times higher than that of white children between 2016 and 2020. When the study’s lead author, Dr. Elizabeth Wolf, associate professor of pediatrics at the VCU School of Medicine, compared accidents to intentional injuries, the sad realities of the mental health crisis came into focus.
Native American children commit suicide at twice the rate of white children, whose rate was already high.
“As a pediatrician, this really took my breath away,” she said.
Gun-related deaths, including accidents, homicides, and suicides, were two to four times higher among black and Native American youth than among white youth, and the risk of dying from a gun-related injury gun ownership more than doubled among black and Native American youth. between 2013 and 2020.
Researchers also drew attention to disparities in other causes of death: Native American children died of pneumonia and influenza at rates three times higher than white children, for example, and black children died of asthma almost eight times more than white children.
What happens next: further research and policy changes.
This particular study did not examine all of the variables that contribute to the causes of childhood illness, injury, and death. Dr. Wolf said she hoped the paper would serve as a “wake-up call…
