WEDNESDAY, Dec. 24, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- Teenage girls who become pregnant are at greater risk for developing osteoporosis, says a new study by the Center for Human Nutrition at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Researchers found a third of a group of teenage mothers had a bone mass that met the definitions for osteoporosis or osteopenia, the precursor condition to the bone disease.
"Adolescents have a narrow window of opportunity to build bone mass, and the added demands of pregnancy mean that a mother and her fetus have to compete for calcium," says lead researcher Dr. Kimberly O'Brien.
O'Brien compared rates of calcium absorption during the girls' third trimester of pregnancy and the early postpartum period.
Calcium absorption more than doubled in the third trimester, comparable to what happens with pregnant adults. But that increased absorption occurs during a time when the adolescent girls are developing 40 percent of their total bone mass.
Girls who consumed more calcium during pregnancy showed less bone loss when tested postpartum than those with poor or average calcium intakes. The research appears in the December issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
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