Causal pathways from maternal age to pregnancy termination: Bayesian network evidence from a Gulf population

Abstract

Maternal age is consistently associated with pregnancy termination, but the association is entangled with parity, metabolic and reproductive history, and socio-demographic context, so the direction of the underlying dependencies is rarely made explicit. This study applies a Bayesian-network framework to a large Gulf population cohort to reconstruct the probabilistic dependence structure linking maternal age to pregnancy termination, to identify the variables that mediate that relationship, and to quantify conditional probabilities along the most plausible causal pathways. The resulting network gives a transparent, auditable account of which pathways carry the age effect and where clinical attention is most likely to be informative.