Community‐level socioeconomic distress is associated with nutritional status in adults with sickle cell anemia

Abstract

Sickle cell anemia (SCA) negatively impacts the ability to achieve educational and occupational goals increasing vulnerability to socioeconomic challenges. In a cross‐sectional analysis of 332 SCA adults, we investigated whether the distressed community index (DCI) was associated with SCA‐related complications and nutritional status. More patients with higher DCI had Medicaid insurance. A higher DCI was independently associated with tobacco use and lower body mass index, serum albumin, and vitamin D 25‐OH levels after adjusting for insurance status but was not associated with SCA‐related complications. Future studies investigating access to healthy foods may help improve health equity in patients with SCA.

Social determinants of health and treatment center affiliation: analysis from the sickle cell disease implementation consortium registry

“…For privacy reasons in rare disease, the SCDIC Registry collected zip codes rather than residence address or census tract. The Distressed Communities Index (DCI) has been used to analyze socioeconomic factors in SCD by zip code [ 36 , 37 ]. DCI for the zip codes of enrolled patients was obtained from the Economics Innovation Group website [ 38 ], The DCI used in this research is a combination of 7 components collected as part of the US Census Bureau American Community Survey, as a metric for the economic disparities between US zip codes: (1) Percent of adults without a high school diploma, (2) Poverty rate, (3) Percent of adults not working, (4) Housing vacancy rate, (5) Median household income, (6) Change in employment, and (7) Change in the number of business establishments.…”