Teenage pregnancy and long-term health of the offspring

Objective
To evaluate whether offspring of women delivering at a young age (<17 years old) are at an increased risk for long- term pediatric morbidity.

Study Design
A retrospective population-based cohort study comparing singleton deliveries of women at different ages who delivered between the years 1991 and 2014 was conducted. Women were classified into three groups: < 17 years, 18–20 years, and a comparison group of 21-35 years old. The incidence of long-term (up to the age of 18 years) hospitalizations of the offspring due to cardiovascular, endocrine, hematological and respiratory morbidity was evaluated in the three maternal age groups. Multiple pregnancies and fetuses with congenital malformations were excluded. Kaplan–Meier survival curves were used to compare the cumulative morbidity incidence. Cox proportional hazards models were performed for each major-system pediatric hospitalization, to control for confounders.

Results
During the study period 213,177 deliveries met the inclusion criteria. Of them, 90.1% (n=192,185) occurred in mothers aged 21-35 years. The rest were 18-20 years old (n= 18645; 8.7%) and a smaller fraction were aged less than 17 years (n= 2347; 1.1%). The incidence of all 4 major system hospitalizations of the offspring did not differ between the groups. In the Kaplan–Meier survival curve, children born to younger mothers did not have a significantly different cumulative incidence of any of the long-term pediatric morbidities evaluated, as compared with older mothers in the comparison group (Figure 1). In the Cox model, while adjusting for gestational age, diabetes, and hypertensive disorders, no independent association between young maternal age and long-term morbidities of the offspring was noted (Table 1).