Abstract: Background: Pregnancy in teenage girls is generally considered a high-risk event due to the perceived physical immaturity and anatomical inadequacies of the mothers, with adverse pregnancy outcomes.
Objective: This study aimed to determine the prevalence of teenage pregnancy and to evaluate the obstetric and perinatal outcomes at a tertiary care hospital.
Methods: A retrospective case-control study was conducted over a two-year period from 1st November 2021 to 31st October 2023. The study population were teenage women, with singleton pregnancy, who were delivered ≥28 weeks of gestation. An equal number of adults 20-34 years were used as control, for comparison. Information was extracted from the hospital records. Data were analyzed with SPSS for Windows version 23. Statistical analysis was performed using the Chi-square test or Fisher’s exact test as appropriate, and the level of significance was set at P value of <0.05.
Results: The prevalence of teenage deliveries was 1.49%. There was a significant association between nulliparity (OR 10.155; P=0.0001) and unbooked status (OR 4.403; P=0.028) with teenage pregnancy. There were no significant differences between the groups with regards to the mode of delivery (P=0.069) and occurrence of medical complications (P=0.244). Significant findings of preterm births and induced/augmented labour in association with teenage pregnancy on bivariate analysis, were no longer significant factors following multivariate logistics regression analysis.
Conclusion: Teenage pregnancy was comparatively not very prevalent in our setting, it was significantly associated with nulliparity and unbooked status, and the obstetric and perinatal outcomes were comparable to their adult counterparts.
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