Teenage pregnancy and perinatal mortality.

In the general population teenage pregnancies present an elevated rate of perinatal mortality compared with pregnancies of women in their 20s. In 2 large-scale university hopsital studies (American and Danish) the teenage pregnancies showed lower perinatal mortality than those of any other age group. This article attempts to determine the origin of these differing results. A comparative analysis was conducted, focusing on methodologies, subject characteristics, and treatment procedures involved in the 2 classes of studies, which involved representative populations and university hospital samples. The uniformly high quality medical treatment provides to all subjects in the university hospital samples contrasted with the uneven quality of treatment found in population studies constituted the most important difference. Since pregnant teenagers generally tend to be of lower socioeconomic status, they are likely to receive inferior medical care. It was argued that this factor could, to a large extent, be responsible for the elevated mortality rates found in teenage pregnancies in representative populations.