Boarding Schools for Girls

The British government plans to supply teenage girls with long-acting contraception injections and/or implants without their parents' permission. British girls have the highest rate of unplanned pregnancies in Europe, resulting in almost 40,000 abortions per year.

Teenagers in Great Britain have access to condoms, morning-after pills, and birth control pills in one out of every three high schools. However, an expert from the British National Institute of Health said that the main problem is that girls are getting pregnant after they forget to take their birth control pills as prescribed.

Birth control implants and injections can render a female infertile for as long as three years.

The new measure is controversial because some doctors believe that using such forms of birth control may have a detrimental effect on bone growth in young women.

Labels: birth-control, teenagers

Depression and anxiety in teenaged girls is linked to low bone density, according to a study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

Dr. Lorah Dorn, an endocrinologist at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, studied girls ages 11 to 17 years old who had histories of depression or anxiety, and found they had a lowered bone mineral content. Other studies have found this to be true among adult women with depressive and anxiety problems.

Dr. Dorn was unsure why this link exists, but she speculated that high levels of certain stress hormones might affect bone density. Low bone density can have serious complications, including an increased risk for bone fractures.

Labels: anxiety, bone_loss, depression

Research from Kings College in London found that today's British teenagers received fewer top scores in academic tests compared to teens thirty years ago. Average scores from both groups were similar, however.

Only one in twenty of today's teens got a top score in mathematical ability, compared to one in five in 1976. In abstract thinking measures, it was one in ten compared to one in four in 1976.

Professor Michael Slayer, who performed the study, had previously found that eleven-year-olds were three years behind those in 1976 in cognitive abilities.

This study appeared in the British Journal of Educational Psychology.

Labels: british_teens

Teens who watch the most television programs with sexual content are more likely to get pregnant or to get their girlfriends pregnant, according to a study that appeared in the journal Pediatrics.

Dr. Anita Chandra, a researcher at Rand Corporation, surveyed 2000 children ages 12 to 17 old in 2001, and then contacted these children again in 2002 and 2004. About 14 percent of those in the study became teen parents, and this group watched more shows with sexual content. The researchers took into account factors such as race and parental education.

"These findings add to the growing body of evidence that what children see on screen affects their behaviors in real life," said Dr. Dmitri Christakis, a professor at the University of Washington and an expert on children's television.

Labels: pregnancy

Once seen as a problem that was limited to bodybuilders and elite athletes, steroid abuse has invaded America's high schools and middle schools - and muscle-bound football players aren't the only ones who are at risk.

According to a Feb. 19 article by Boston Globe staff writer Stan Grossfeld, teenage girls are also turning to steroids in misguided attempts to improve their appearance:

A recent report by the Oregon Health and Science University using data from the Centers for Disease Control said 5.3 percent of teenage girls admitted to using anabolic steroids, mostly for body-enhancing reasons or self-protection, not athletics.

According to 2003 CDC data, seventh-grade girls were the fastest-growing group of steroid users, with more than 7 percent using them, the controversial report stated.

Steroids can cause liver tumors, increase blood pressure, stunt growth and, in girls, deepen their voices. Nevertheless, one recent study found that 57 percent of high school steroid users said they would risk shortening their life for increased performance.

"They're young and they think they are invincible," says the study's author, Jay Hoffman, chairman of health and science at the College of New Jersey.

Dionne Roberts, who told Grossfeld that she tried steroids to help her get "six-pack abs" shortly after graduating high school in 2003, said that the drugs drove her to the brink of despair. "I just became so totally depressed," she said in the article. "I was definitely suicidal. I just was so upset the smallest thing would set me off."

Synthetic substances that are similar to the hormone testosterone, steroids can inflict a variety of undesirable effects on the bodies of teen girls, including irregular menstruation, excess facial and body hair, and severe acne.

Labels: athletes, drug, steriods

U.S. youth between the ages of 5 and 19 are being medicated at record levels for a variety of conditions, with young girls showing the greatest increases, according to a report by researchers associated with the University of St. Louis, the Kansas Health Institute, and Express Scripts (a pharmacy benefit management company):

• The use of medication to treat Type 2 diabetes in young girls increased by 147 percent. (Among boys in the same age group, the increase was 39 percent.)


• Prescriptions for drugs to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder increased by 63 percent for adolescent girls, and 33 percent for boys.


• Among girls ages 15 to 19, antidepressant use increased by 6.8 percent. Use of similar medications among boys ages 15 to 19 decreased.

"Our study findings indicate that these increased levels of chronic medication use are symptoms of broader underlying issues affecting children today," Dr. Emily R. Cox, senior director of research at Express Scripts, said in a Nov. 3 university-issued press release.

"These trends are worrisome given that many of these therapies are treating conditions with modifiable risk factors and if not addressed, many of these children will carry these chronic conditions into adulthood," Cox said.

The study was published in the November 2008 edition of the journal Pediatrics.

Labels: medications, prescription_drugs

According to researchers with the RAND Corporation, teenagers who regularly view sexually explicit television programs are more likely to become pregnant or father a child before the age of 20 than are peers who aren't exposed to such shows.

"Our findings suggest that television may play a significant role in the high rates of teenage pregnancy in the United States," Chandra said in a Nov. 3 article in the Canadian newspaper The National Post. "We're not saying we're establishing causation, but we are saying this is one factor that we were able to prospectively link to the teen pregnancy outcome."

A Nov. 5 Medscape Today article by Marlene Busko provided the following highlights of the RAND study:

• 2,003 teenagers completed the baseline phone interview about television viewing in 2001, and 1,461 of the teens also completed two follow-up phone interviews, which were conducted in 2002 and 2004.


• The researchers focused on 23 television programs - including dramas, comedies, reality shows, and animated cartoons - that were widely available to (and popular with) teens, and which contained sexual content that included physical flirting, sexual talk, and intercourse.


• 718 participants had engaged in sexual activity by the third survey and reported data on pregnancy status.


• At the time of the third survey, 58 girls had become pregnant and 33 boys had fathered a child over the three-year period. This meant that 14 percent of those who had participated in the surveys had been involved in a pregnancy - almost double the 7.6 percent teen pregnancy rate in the general population.

"The study highlights the importance of helping teens become more critical consumers of television and other media that do not present a balanced portrayal of possible consequences of sex," Dr. Anita Chandra, the study's lead author, told Busko.

On its website, the RAND Corporation is described as "a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision-making through research and analysis." The RAND research was supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a component of the National Institutes of Health.

Labels: influences, sex, TV