Prevalence of home pregnancy testing among adolescents

of early pregnancy and childbearing. 2 Adolescents who have negative pregnancy test results may be at high risk for subsequent pregnancy; Zabin et al. 3 showed that 58% of the urban adolescents who received negative pregnancy test results at a clinic became pregnant within 18 months. Such youths may be ideal targets for clinic-based pregnancy prevention interventions, but because of the availability and popularity of home pregnancy tests, some high-risk youths may not seek pregnancy tests from health care providers and thus will not be accessible to interventionists. Home pregnancy test use has been examined for college students and pregnant adolescents and women, 4,5 but use of the tests in the general adolescent population is unknown. The purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence of home pregnancy testing among adolescents in clinic populations. We hypothesized that home pregnancy testing would be more prevalent than clinic-based testing and that adolescents who received negative home pregnancy test results would not follow up with clinical verification, thus reducing provider access to at-risk youths for pregnancy prevention counseling.