Abstract
Background: adolescent pregnancy is highly prevalent in developing countries. It is associated with poverty, induced abortion, low maternal schooling, and maternal and infant mortality.
Objective: To verify whether women born to adolescent mothers are also prone to become adolescent mothers and to what extent this association is due to shared socioeconomic circumstances.
Methods: questionnaires were applied to women who gave birth to a singleton female liveborn in 1978/79 in Ribeirao Preto, Brazil (first generation mothers). Their daughters were interviewed in 2002/04 (second generation mothers). The questions comprised information on first generation mother variables (age at first delivery - adolescent or not - and family income) and second generation mother variables (schooling level, childhood work and age at menarche). The association between first generation mother's age at first delivery and second generation mother's adolescent pregnancy (yes, compared to older mothers plus women who were not yet mothers) was assessed by means of univariable and multivariable Poisson regression models. The other variables listed above were considered as confounders.
Results: 1059 first and second generation woman pairs were interviewed. 181 second generation mothers also gave birth to a child while being an adolescent. If a first generation mother was an adolescent at her first delivery, her daughter presented a relative risk (RR) of being also an adolescent mother of 2.10 (95% Confidence Interval 1.58, 2.82). After adjustment, the association was no longer observed, whilst low first generation mother's family income (p=0.003), second generation mother's low schooling level (p<0.001) and low age at menarche (p=0.032) were associated with adolescent pregnancy among second generation mothers.
Conclusions: women born to adolescent mothers are more prone to become adolescent mothers. Repeated teenage pregnancies across generations seem to be related to social circumstances shared by both mothers and daughters.
Supported by CNPq and FAPESP.
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Barbosa, A., Cardoso, V., Barbieri, M. et al. 23 Do Adolescent Pregnancies Tend to Repeat Across Generations?. Pediatr Res 58, 358 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-200508000-00052
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-200508000-00052