KEY POINTS:
Today's adolescents are the first generation to have grown up less healthy than their parents, doctors said yesterday.
Alcohol, tobacco, drugs, obesity and sexually transmitted diseases have replaced childhood infections of the past such as tuberculosis and polio and are exacting a greater toll. The difference is that the modern threats to teenager's health are preventable.
Between 1970 and 2000, obesity in adolescents has increased fourfold, sexually transmitted diseases have increased threefold, drinking has increased, smoking rates are unchanged since 1982, and suicide is slightly up, figures show.
The trends are highlighted in a series of papers on adolescent health published as a special supplement by the Lancet which the journal says is an area of medicine that remains "neglected, marginalised or ignored in many countries".
Adolescence is when teenagers start smoking, drinking and having sex - behaviours which could have a huge impact on their long term health, the journal said. But, the opportunity to intervene was being missed.
Russell Viner, a specialist in adolescent health at University College Hospital, said the ages at which young people were permitted to vote, drink, drive or buy cigarettes were out of kilter with their biological and social maturity and should be rethought.
The voting age should be reduced to 16 to increase young people's sense of responsibility and engagement in society, which could reduce risky behaviour, he said.
"Young people are the only group in the population where every health indicator is either static or adverse.
"We have less old fashioned infectious disease but it has been replaced by social causes of death and illness which are causing significant health problems that weren't there 40 years ago."
"[Teenagers] in the second decade of life outnumber [children] in the first decade but 95 per cent of the resources [for health] are focused on children. This group has been absent from the public health challenge."
Many young people remained tied to their families until well into their twenties despite having become biologically mature in their early teens.
The modern mismatch between biological maturity and social maturity, marked by marriage or financial independence, had coincided with an increase in risky behaviours leading to injuries, mental disorders and suicides.
Dr Viner said there was a very large gap after puberty when young people did not have the institutions of adulthood to control those behaviours and did not get them until they were into their twenties.
Glenn Bowes, professor of paediatrics at the University of Melbourne, said adolescents were at particular risk from the drinks industry which was targeting them just as their parents generation had been targeted by the tobacco industry.
"High potency products are being heavily marketed to get young people to drink before the legal age which is having a very negative impact but is all denied by the industry. Let us hope it does not take us decades to recognise the impact it is having as it did with tobacco."
Professor Andre Tylee, of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College, London, said mental disorders related to alcohol and drug use and other causes were increasing but there was little guidance on how to engage young people in treatment.
- INDEPENDENT
