LITTLE FALLS, N.J., July 17 -- Increases in teenage births, AIDS
infections, and other sexually transmitted diseases indicate that
progress in adolescent sexual health may have slowed in recent years, researchers say.
Teen birth rates
for girls decreased for almost 15 years before starting an upward trend
in 2005, and the annual rate of AIDS diagnoses among boys in that age
group has nearly doubled in the last 10 years, according to a new CDC
After decreasing for more than 20 years, gonorrhea infection rates leveled off, while syphilis rates have been increasing, CDC's Lorrie Gavin, PhD, and colleagues reported in the July 17 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
"The sexual and reproductive health of America's young persons remains an important public health concern," the researchers said. "Earlier progress appears to be slowing and perhaps reversing."
The report is a summary of data on young people from ages 10 to 24 from multiple sources, including the National Vital Statistics System, the National Examination Survey, and the National Survey of Family Growth.
The researchers found that about one million young people in the U.S. had chlamydia, gonorrhea, or syphilis in 2006. That group accounted for nearly half of all incident sexually transmitted diseases even though it represented only 25% of the sexually active population, the researchers said.
A large proportion of disease occurs in the youngest population, with about 18,000 youths between ages 10 and 14 diagnosed with sexually transmitted diseases in 2006.
Chlamydia was the most commonly reported STD, followed by gonorrhea, and then syphilis.
Rates of all three diseases were highest among non-Hispanic blacks for all age groups.
Also, about 25% of girls from to 19 and 45% of those from 20 to 24 had human papillomavirus infections between 2003 and 2004.
While teen pregnancy rates decreased every year from 1991 to 2005, they started increasing from 2005 to 2007.
About 745,000 pregnancies occurred among girls under 20 in 2004, with 16,000 of those involving girls from 10 to 14.
Like disparities in STD infection, pregnancy rates were much higher for Hispanic and non-Hispanic black girls ages 15 to 19 than in white girls (132.8 and 128 per 100,000 population, versus 45.2).
With regard to AIDS, the annual rate of diagnoses among boys ages 10 to 24 has nearly doubled in the last 10 years, from 1.3 cases per 100,000 in 1997 to 2.5 in 2006.
That year, about 22,000 youths in 33 states were living with HIV/AIDS.
Again, non-Hispanic blacks were most likely to be affected. Black teenage girls ages 15 to 19 were more likely to live with AIDS than Hispanics, Alaska Natives, whites, or Pacific Islanders (49.6 per 100,000 compared with 12.2, 2.6, 2.5, and 1.3, respectively).
Sexual assaults also increased over the study period, the researchers said, with 105,000 girls visiting an emergency department for a sexual assault injury between 2004 and 2006. About 27,500 of those visits were among girls ages 10 to 14.
The researchers said that the southern states generally had the highest rates of negative sexual and reproductive health outcomes, including early pregnancies and STDs.
They said their findings "underscore the importance of sustaining efforts to promote adolescent reproductive health."
"Practitioners," they said, "can use [this information] when making decisions about how to allocate resources and identify those subpopulations that are in greatest need."
The study was limited by self-reported data, undetected cases of disease, challenges in estimating pregnancy rates, and lack of ability to investigate causality.
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