The social determinants of health of the child-adolescent immigration and its influence on the nutritional status: systematic review.

OBJECTIVE

to review the social determinants of health more characteristic of the child and adolescents of immigrants, by reviewing the literature and assess its effect on nutritional status.

METHODS

a systematic review was performed using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) in PubMed (Medline) and The Cochrane Library, in order to identify undetected studies; articles bibliographic lists were examined. The final election was done according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. No restrictions on sex and ethnicity of the participants. STROBE checkpoints were used for an information and methodological quality control. As Social Determinants of Health (SDH); social, demographic and economic conditions were considered for the study of their effect on the nutritional status.

RESULTS

from 31 identified articles 18 are included in this study, 17 (94.4%) had a good or excellent quality. Hispanic and African were the most studied ethnicities; birth place and parent's residence period were used for generational classification. Alimentary culture and linguistic isolation of the first generation have a protective effect preventing from overweight and obesity risk while it decrease in second and third generation due to the experienced acculturation process equalizing their weight gain to natives; which prevalence is higher among Hispanics. No relation was found for nutritional status differences between sexes neither alimentary aids protective effect hypothesis was confirmed.

CONCLUSIONS

the SDH with greater influence on child-adolescent immigrants were the socio-demographic conditions; among them: residence period distinguish the three identified generations while linguistic barrier and ethnic background are truly influential on the biological response to the experimented change caused by the acculturation process, establishing differences in the nutritional status.