Adolescent pregnancies and adherence to puerperal consultation.
Ingrid Rosane Pinto, Jéssica Aparecida da Silva, Patrícia Casale Parra and 3 others
PMID 36197392WHAT IT FOUND
Adolescent puerperal women did not differ from non-adolescent women in postpartum consultation attendance.
Overall attendance was 34.7%, and adolescent attendance was 31.8%. Illegal drug use was linked to non-attendance; first-time mothers were more likely to attend.
Key findings
01Adherence to the scheduled puerperal consultation was 34.7% overall and 31.8% among adolescents, and the paper found no statistically significant difference by age.
02In the adjusted Poisson model, use of illegal drugs was associated with non-adherence, and primiparity was associated with adherence.
03All adolescent participants had prenatal care with six or more consultations, and none of their newborns were born weighing less than 2500 grams.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The sample was a convenience sample of 121 puerperal women, corresponding to 21% of all puerperal women served in the period, and it came from one teaching hospital in rural Minas Gerais, so it may not apply to other settings. Women whose postpartum return visit was scheduled to a basic health unit or family health unit were excluded, so the study does not represent many routine postpartum follow-up pathways. Only 22 adolescents were included, so the study cannot show whether this finding would hold for larger adolescent populations. The study is cross-sectional and measured attendance after the fact; it cannot show that illegal drug use, primiparity, or any other factor caused non-adherence. The authors state that external validity is limited because the data cannot be generalized to other realities.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that adolescent mothers are less likely to attend postpartum visits. The paper reports no statistically significant difference in adherence by age, and it is a single-hospital cross-sectional study, so it cannot prove that age, drug use, or primiparity causes attendance differences.