Teen Pregnancy May Raise Risk of Early Death

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by HealthDay.

Teen pregnancy can change the trajectory of one's life, but now a new study suggests it could also shorten that life.

Canadian researchers report that women who were pregnant as teenagers were more likely to die before they reached the age of 31.

“The younger the person was when they became pregnant, the greater their risk was of premature death,” study first author Dr. Joel Ray, an obstetric medicine specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto told the New York Times. “Some people will argue that we shouldn’t be judgmental about this, but I think we’ve always known intuitively that there’s an age that is too young for pregnancy.”

The study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, turned to a health insurance registry to track pregnancy outcomes among just over 2 million teenagers in Ontario, Canada. That database included all girls who were 12 between April 1991 and March 2021.

The results suggest that even after weighing confounding factors like other health issues, income and education, teens who carried pregnancies to term were more than twice as likely to suffer premature death.

While the dangers dropped somewhat among women who had terminated a pregnancy as teenagers, those women were still 40 percent more likely to die prematurely, compared with those who had not been pregnant as teens.

Exactly what cut their lives short? Women who had been pregnant as teenagers were more than twice as likely to die young of an unintentional injury, while they were twice as likely to die from a self-inflicted injury.

Source: HealthDay
https://www.healthday.com/health-news/pregnancy/teen-pregnancy-may-raise-risk-of-early-death