Population-level SDOH and Pediatric Asthma Health Care Utilization: A Systematic Review

Spatial analysis is a population health methodology that can determine geographic distributions of asthma outcomes and examine their relationship to place-based social determinants of health (SDOH).To systematically review US-based studies analyzing associations between SDOH and asthma health care utilization by geographic entities.Pubmed, Medline, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature.Empirical, observational US-based studies were included if (1) outcomes included asthma-related emergency department visits or revisits, and hospitalizations or rehospitalizations; (2) exposures were ≥1 SDOH described by the Healthy People (HP) SDOH framework; (3) analysis occurred at the population-level using a geographic entity (eg, census-tract); (4) results were reported separately for children ≤18 years.Two reviewers collected data on study information, demographics, geographic entities, SDOH exposures, and asthma outcomes. We used the HP SDOH framework’s 5 domains to organize and synthesize study findings.The initial search identified 815 studies; 40 met inclusion criteria. Zip-code tabulation areas (n = 16) and census-tracts (n = 9) were frequently used geographic entities. Ten SDOH were evaluated across all HP domains. Most studies (n = 37) found significant associations between ≥1 SDOH and asthma health care utilization. Poverty and environmental conditions were the most often studied SDOH. Eight SDOH-poverty, higher education enrollment, health care access, primary care access, discrimination, environmental conditions, housing quality, and crime – had consistent significant associations with asthma health care utilization.Population-level SDOH are associated with asthma health care utilization when evaluated by geographic entities. Future work using similar methodology may improve this research’s quality and utility.