When it comes to lowering the number of repeated teenage births, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore researchers found that computer-assisted, home-based intervention appears to reduce the risk among low-income teens and at a reasonable cost.

The researchers' report can be found in the April issue of "Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine." 

The researchers note that after 14 years of decline, the U.S. Teenage birth rate increased in 2006 and 2007. Multiple teen births among African American and Hispanic girls are more common and hard to prevent, the researchers said. And the results can be devastating to them and the public.

"Both first and subsequent births to U.S. teenages produce substantial detrimental health, social and economic burdens," according to the report. "Repeated childbearing during adolescence compounds the risk of academic failure for the teenage mother and increases the public costs associated with child welfare, criminal justice system involvement and long-term poverty." 

Dr. Beth Barnet of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and her colleagues assessed costs associated with an intervention that achieved a 45 percent reduction in repeated births within 2 years in a previous study. The mothers were low-income African American teens.

The pregnant girls, 235 of them 18 or younger, were recruited and assigned to usual care or one of two home-based interventios, a quarterly computer-assisted motivational intervention or that intervention plus two visits by a counselor. After 24 months, teens receiving either intervention were significantly less likely to have another baby. The average cost per teen was $2,064.

Few studies have been evaluated for costs and benefits, according to the researchers. They said their findings suggest that computer-assisted motivational intervention is "at least as cost-effective as these programs and warrents replication in larger samples."