Studies have shown that teenage pregnancy increases the risk of a young woman dropping out of school and struggling with poverty. Teens are also more more likely to experience serious medical complications during pregnancy.
Now a large study in Canada reports one other disturbing finding: Women who grow to be pregnant as teenagers usually tend to die before his thirty first birthday. This trend was observed amongst women who carried teenage pregnancies to term, in addition to amongst those that suffered miscarriages.
“The younger a person was when they became pregnant, the greater the risk of premature death,” said Dr. Joel G. Ray, an obstetrician and epidemiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and the primary creator of the study. It was published Thursday in JAMA Network Open.
“Some will argue that we shouldn’t judge this issue, but I think we have always intuitively known that there is an age that is too young to be pregnant,” he added.
The study used the provincial medical health insurance registry to research pregnancy outcomes amongst roughly 2.2 million teenage girls in Ontario, Canada, including all girls who turned 12 years of age between April 1991 and March 2021.
Even after researchers took into consideration girls’ pre-existing health problems and differences in income and education, teenagers who carried pregnancies to term were greater than twice as more likely to die prematurely later in life.
Researchers found similar odds amongst women who had an ectopic pregnancy as teenagers, in which a fertilized egg develops outside the uterus, or pregnancies that ended in stillbirth or miscarriage.
The risk was much lower amongst women who terminated their pregnancies as teenagers, but they still had a 40 percent higher risk of premature death compared with women who weren’t pregnant.
Dr. Ray and his colleagues found that the best risk of premature death was amongst women who became pregnant before the age of 16 and amongst those that became pregnant greater than once during childhood.
The evaluation found that most premature deaths are brought on by injuries – each self-inflicted and unintentional, similar to assaults.
Women who became pregnant as teenagers were greater than twice as more likely to die young from unintentional injury in comparison with women who weren’t pregnant as teenagers, and were also twice as more likely to die from self-harm.
In a comment accompanying the article, Elizabeth L. Cook, a researcher at Child Trends, a research organization focused on children and adolescents, noted that teen pregnancy will not be a factor in premature mortality.
Rather, it could point to a number of other aspects, including antagonistic childhood experiences, that increase the risk of premature death. She called for more research to grasp these causes.
Although some teenagers decide to grow to be pregnant, “the majority of teenage pregnancies are unintended, exposing shortcomings in existing systems of education, guidance and support for young people,” Ms Cook wrote. The stigma and isolation that many pregnant teenagers experience “can hinder their development as adults,” she added. The latest study is not the primary to indicate a link between teen pregnancy and premature death, however it appears to be one of the biggest and most robust.
A 2017 Finnish study found that women who became pregnant as teenagers they usually tend to die prematurely by suicidealcohol, cardiovascular diseases and automotive accidents. In this study, excess risk was attributed to low levels of education.
Although the risk of pregnancy generally increases with age, pregnant teenagers are more likely than women in their 20s and 30s to develop pregnancy-related hypertension and a life-threatening condition called preeclampsia.
They are more likely to present birth prematurely and have small babies, and their children often have other serious health problems and are at greater risk of death in the primary 12 months of life.
