Maternal mortality is a well-studied issue that has led to better care for new mothers. But there have been few studies tracking paternal mortality, and one researcher decided to fill that gap.
Chicago pediatrician Craig Garfield noticed that several mothers in his neonatal care unit were dealing with the loss of a partner. The causes of death were many, including accidents, gunshot wounds, drug overdoses, and other "preventable" causes of death. Did these deaths reflect a larger pattern relating to new fatherhood, and was there a way for doctors to intervene?
Garfield and some colleagues at Northwestern University decided to conduct one of the first studies on paternal mortality.
"They found that of 130,000 men who became new fathers between 2017 and 2022, almost 800 died during that same 5-year period, and 60 percent of those deaths were from potentially preventable causes like homicide, accidental injury, and suicide," reports Nautilus.
Surprisingly, the study also found that fatherhood protected men. Garfield and his team found that fatherhood seems to be protective of men’s health overall, as fathers died at a lower rate than non-fathers.
“From the pediatrician’s perspective of the child, both mother and father are really important to the health of the child and the family," Garfield told Nautilus.
In an interview with Nautilus's Kristen French, Garfield explains why he undertook a study of paternal mortality.
Fathers are an area that we’ve been focusing on and thinking about—the role of fathers and how to support them. Also, I learned a lot from looking at how we think about mothers and how we think about supporting mothers. One of the newer things that’s come into public health are maternal mortality review committees, or MRCs, multidisciplinary groups at state or local level that review all deaths that occur within a year of childbirth.
But oddly enough, in my clinical experience—and I work in a neonatal intensive care unit—it’s more common to come across a family where the partner has died during pregnancy or after the birth of the baby, as opposed to the mother. I got to thinking that no one really has looked at that. This concept of paternal mortality is really novel. This is one of the first studies to use that term. One reason for that is that maternal mortality is often something where we’re looking at pregnancy-related complications or ways the healthcare system failed the mother.
Garfield wonders if some kind of intervention for new fathers, similar to the interventions in the mental health of new mothers, might save lives.
"Maybe mental-health screening of fathers, the way we do with mothers, could have caught someone who was suicidal and needed some help," he told Nautilus. "We might have different ways to protect against other accidents or drug overdoses."
Does the fact that the 800 men who died had just become fathers have anything to do with their deaths?
Unfortunately, we don't know the individual stories of the 800 fathers. This is different from what it is for mothers, where the maternal mortality review committees (MRC) go into great detail about why a mother died within the first year after giving birth.
The study also found that new fathers had better health outcomes than childless men.
But the other interesting finding of the study was that fatherhood was actually protective. At all ages, from 25 up until almost 60, when you looked at men who are fathers and compared them with men who are not fathers, the death rate for men who are fathers was lower or better than it was for men who are not fathers. There seems to be something protective about becoming a father, and yet, there’s still a sizable number of men who are dying when their children are still young. That’s going to have a really negative impact on the family and on the child.
Perhaps not surprisingly, fatherhood makes men alter their priorities in ways they may never have imagined. The mystery is why that doesn't appear to affect new father mortality.
Our research has shown that for many dads, that transition to fatherhood is a real awakening. It changes their priorities and their view of the future. In long semi-structured interviews, they describe an idea of wanting to be there when their baby enters kindergarten. They want to be there when their baby goes to middle school or graduates high school. As a result, some men start to try to reduce their risks in the general community. This isn’t a study of causality. But clearly, there are more dads who are dying than moms who are dying. And this was only in one state.
"We can’t change what we don’t measure, and we don’t know what we don’t know, so let’s at least get some measurement going so we can understand what exactly is happening," Garfield said.
Garfield promises more extensive studies to get a better handle on the issues that are driving the numbers. It's an issue that bears watching.
