Dear Dr. Papageorghiou, We thank Dr Anita Matai and Dr Avir Sarkar for their interest in our article and for their comments.1 Their letter gives us the opportunity to clarify several issues in relation to our work.2 The first issue is the definition of premature mortality, which in public health generally refers to deaths occurring before the average age of death in a given population.3 By analogy, we felt that deaths among adolescent girls could be considered as premature mortality.
