Diagnoses given in specialist health care to Norwegian-born children with one immigrant parent. A register-based study.

Objective: To compare the risk of receiving diagnoses of somatic health problems in specialist health care among Norwegian-born children with one immigrant parent to children of Norwegian background.

Methods: Data from Medical Birth Registry of Norway, Norwegian Patient Registry and Statistics Norway were linked. All children born in Norway to two Norwegian-born parents or to one Norwegian-born parent and one immigrant parent, aged 0-10 years between 2008 and 2018 were included. Diagnostic categories of infections, non-infectious medical conditions and non-infectious neurological conditions were included from 2008 onwards. Hazards of diagnoses by immigrant background were assessed by Cox regressions adjusted for sex and birth year, and additionally for parental education and household income.

Results: Compared with children with Norwegian background, children with an immigrant mother had lower hazards of receiving a diagnosis of any somatic condition (hazard ratio 0.97, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.95, 0.98), infections in total (hazard ratio 0.93, 95% CI 0.91, 0.95), total non-infectious medical conditions (hazard ratio 0.97, 95% CI 0.95, 0.98) and of any neurological condition (hazard ratio 0.89, 95% CI 0.86, 0.93). There were variations for individual diagnosis groups and by the immigrant parent being a mother or a father, and by parental region of origin. Adjustments for socioeconomic variables made negligible changes to estimates.

Conclusions: Children of one immigrant parent do not have overall worse health than children with Norwegian background. Lower hazards of diagnoses of many conditions among those with an immigrant mother warrants further research into possible underutilization of services and barriers to use.