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It took the better part of a century for maternal mortality to be recognized, forgotten and finally recognized again as an urgent public health crisis in the United States. In contrast, research shows fathers—particularly men in their 20s through early 40s—die disproportionately from preventable causes such as suicide, overdose, homicide and accidental injury. Yet paternal mortality is rarely examined in connection with the transition to parenthood.

A Northwestern study examined all 130,267 babies born in Georgia in 2017 and tracked whether their fathers died at any point during the following five years, through 2022. Of the 796 fathers who died within five years, 60% died of preventable causes, which the study authors call a "huge, missed opportunity." These deaths resulted from homicide (143), accidental injury (142), suicide (102) or overdose (93), while 296 fathers died of natural causes.

While maternal mortality review committees focus specifically and in depth on deaths of mothers in the first year of a child's life, this is, to the researchers' knowledge, the first study published in a major medical journal to examine paternal mortality in the years following a child's birth. It was published in JAMA Pediatrics.

"Our data show that fathers die frequently in the first years of their child's life, and we have no systems in place to understand how we might prevent it," said corresponding author Dr.

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