A Tale of Two Cities: Air Pollution Exposure, Social Inequalities, and Perinatal Health in Madrid

Nerea Bello Iglesias , UNED

Perinatal health, measured here through low birth weight (LBW) and preterm birth (PTB), is a major health determinant closely related to subsequent processes of cumulative (dis)advantage and, therefore, social stratification. This research aims to disentangle the relationship between individual stressors closely related to health at birth, through the measurement of the maternal socioeconomic resources, and the impact of in utero exposure to environmental pollution, a contextual stressor widely present in large metropolitan areas. For the Spanish context, Madrid condenses both problematics. It is a city with a strong socio-spatial segregation, where population with lower socioeconomic status (SES) tend to cluster in the southern districts and, in addition, it is a city with high levels of pollution, especially related to traffic. I will use register data from the Childbirth Statistics Bulletin, for the perinatal health and maternal SES variables, and pollution data from The Integrated Air Quality System of the Madrid City Council, focusing on three pollutants: NO2, PM2.5 and PM10. The objective of this article is to study whether there is a correlation between worse perinatal outcomes and high levels of pollution in Madrid, and whether there is an unequal distribution of these worse outcomes, affecting to a greater extent those geographical areas associated with lower socioeconomic strata in the city of Madrid. Detecting the clustering of stressors (both individual and contextual) that influence health at birth can help to identify socio-spatial segregation and promote policy measures to mitigate this negative impact.

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 Presented in Session P50. Environment and Sustainabilty