Structural and Social Determinants of Maternal Mental Health, Morbidity, and Inequities in COMBO

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated health disparities related to structural racism and discrimination (SRD), economic marginalization, and other social determinants of health (SDOH). Pregnant and postpartum women face unique social and health vulnerabilities related to the pandemic, including risk for stigma, housing, food, income and employment insecurity, psychological distress, and even mortality - risks and consequences which are disproportionately significant and adverse for women of color and low socioeconomic status (SES). However, the collision of these multiple intersecting 21st century public health crises have not yet been empirically or rigorously studied for inequities in maternal mental health and severe morbidity. The COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcome (COMBO) initiative is a large multidisciplinary collaborative established at Columbia University Irving Medical Center to follow SARS-CoV-2 exposed laboring mothers and their newborns and compare their long-term health and wellbeing to case-matched dyads without prenatal exposure. The focus of the parent NIMH 'COMBO' R01 MH126531 is to understand the effects of SARS-CoV- 2 on mother-infant brain-behavior functioning in a subset of 100 COMBO-enrolled dyads with and without prenatal SARS-COV-2 infections. Responding to key priorities of NOSI NOT-OD-21-071 and leveraging COMBO's robust infrastructure, this administrative supplement (PA-20-272) expands the parent R01 to study the independent and interactive effects of SRD/SDOH and SARS-CoV-2 on inequities in maternal mental health, taking advantage of COMBO's unique setting (first pandemic epicenter) and understudied socially disadvantaged sample (>600 mother-infant dyads enrolled to-date, with 63% mothers identifying as racial/ethnic minority and/or low-SES women). By expanding parent R01 brain imaging, surveys, semi- structured interviews, and electronic health record (EHR) extraction, we will test the overarching hypothesis that SRD/SDOH and SARS-CoV-2 independently and additively increase risk of adverse maternal mental health outcomes, with the magnitude of the negative impact being greatest for women of social disadvantage and the health disparity gap ballooning during - and persisting post - the pandemic. Findings will inform patient-centered, multi-level interventions to ameliorate the intersecting epidemics of SRD/SDOH and SARS- CoV-2 and their mental health sequelae for women of social disadvantage in NYC and beyond.