Black kids face death, complications after surgery at ‘terrifying’ rates, study finds
Typically, healthy people are expected to recover well from medical procedures and have low complication rates, but a new study shows that Black children were about 3.5 times more likely to die following surgery than white children.
The “frequently observed racial disparity in health care outcomes” is thought to stem from poverty, lack of access to medical care and biological predisposition to underlying health conditions, which Black people face at higher rates than their white counterparts, the study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics said.
The paper is also the first, according to the researchers, to analyze how race impacts post-surgical outcomes in healthy children.
“The expectation should be that complication rates and/or mortality among healthy children won’t vary based on racial category —what we found is that they do,” study lead author Dr. Olubukola Nafiu, pediatric anesthesiologist and vice chair for Academic Affairs and Research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said in a news release.
The fact that Black patients suffer from poorer surgical outcomes than white patients has been “established for a long time,” Nafiu said.
This difference is often attributed to economic and social conditions that sometimes force Black people to miss out on needed medical care, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although the death rate for Black Americans has decreased by 25% from 1999 to 2015, those aged 18 to 49 are still about two times more likely to die from heart disease than whites, while those ages 35 to 64 are about 50% more likely to have high blood pressure, the agency said.
Still, young Black Americans are living and dying from health conditions typically found in older, white people.
To get a better understanding of these phenomena in healthy children, the researchers studied noncardiac surgical outcomes for 172,549 patients from the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program Pediatric database from 2012 to 2017, the study said.
Of the total, about 14% of children developed post-operative complications, but being Black made those odds much higher — about 27% greater than a white child, the researchers said in the release. Some of the complications include bleeding requiring transfusion, sepsis, unplanned reoperation and unplanned reintubation.
Black children were also about 3.5 times more likely to die within 30 days after their surgery than white kids, the researchers said, even when factoring in age, sex, case urgency and length of operating time.
“Although these findings are unsurprising, they are still nonetheless terrifying and unacceptable,” Dr. Nia Heard-Garris, a Chicago pediatrician who chairs the minority health, equity and inclusion committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told CNN.
“To think of any children dying after surgery is distressing; however, children who have no or mild illness prior to surgery and to go on to experience complications, adverse events, or even death requires immediate attention and action,” Heard-Garris told the outlet.
The researchers noted that their findings do not suggest that race alone caused these outcomes, but rather that race is “strongly associated with them.”
The team’s next step is to understand what post-operative complications are behind the deaths in order to identify ways to combat and prevent them.
This story was originally published July 20, 2020 at 8:47 AM with the headline "Black kids face death, complications after surgery at ‘terrifying’ rates, study finds."
