Researchers for more than a decade have said blacks have the nation's worst infant mortality rate because black mothers get the poorest prenatal care. But a new study of other ethnic groups suggests there's more to it than that.
Mexican-American women, on average, get as poor prenatal care as black women, but their infant mortality rate is twice as good - even better than whites' - according to a study by government health specialists.The study suggests that something beyond prenatal care and socioeconomics may be responsible for high infant mortality in blacks.
Mexican-American women and their babies are "a real anomaly," said Dr. Joel C. Kleinman, an analyst with the National Center for Health Statistics, a branch of the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control.
Such women "have a much, much lower level of education, tend to be poorer and get relatively little prenatal care, but they do very well" in infant mortality, he said.
Possible explanations include "a lot more social support than other comparable groups, like blacks," and "maybe some dietary factors we are not aware of," Kleinman said in an interview last week.
"We have to really do a lot more study of Mexican-Americans to understand why they do so well," he said.
Mexican-Americans are the third-largest minority group in the United States, accounting for a quarter-million births per year, the NCHS study said.
The study found that 18.7 out of every 1,000 blacks born in the United States die before their first birthday, more than double the white rate and the worst of any ethnic group studied. But Mexican-Americans' infant mortality rate was only 9.0, slightly better than the white rate of 9.1.
That's true even though only about 60 percent of Mexican-American women got prenatal care in the first trimester, the same percentage as black, Puerto Rican and American Indian women. Among white, Cuban and Asian women in this country, about 80 percent got early prenatal care.
A higher percentage of Mexican-American women than white women give birth as teenagers - 18 percent to 11 percent. Among black women, the rate is 24 percent.
Health experts say infants of teenage mothers run a higher risk of complications, probably because of poorer economic standing, nutrition and medical care.