Although the health of the world's infants and children has improved significantly in the past 50 years, that same success has not been achieved for adolescents and young adults, say reports out today.
According to a UNICEF report, 1.4 million adolescents (ages 10-19) die each year from traffic injuries, complications of childbirth, suicide, violence, AIDS and other health-related causes.
A synthesis of international data for the medical journal The Lancet finds injuries are the leading cause of death (40%) among 1.8 billion young people ages 10-24. That compares with 10% from injuries for the general population, researchers say.
"We've done a terrific job in both developing countries and the U.S. at reducing infant and under-age-5 mortality and improving all kinds of things like prematurity, safe deliveries and immunizations, but we haven't seen those same declines with older teens and young adults," says adolescent medicine specialist John Santelli of Columbia University in New York.
The reason: "Young adults and older teens die from very different conditions" than children. "We haven't done enough thinking about the health behaviors that emerge during adolescence," says Santelli.
There has been "a long history of not recognizing adolescence as a specific population in need of targeted intervention in a number of areas, including health," says UNICEF's Judith Diers. "In many countries, you move very quickly from childhood into adulthood. There isn't even a period that's understood as adolescence."
UNICEF says 1.2 billion adolescents account for nearly one-fifth of the world's population. Mortality rates increase with age, jumping from 95 deaths per 100,000 for ages 10-14 to 139 for ages 15-19, to 224 for 20-24.
But mortality rates alone don't tell the full story of adolescence "as a time of transitions, when young people without opportunities can drop off the track and never fully recover," Diers says. More evidence:
An estimated 2.2 million are living with HIV, 60% of them girls. Most do not know.
11% of births, about 16 million, are to girls ages 15-19.
20% of adolescents a year experience mental health problems; most common are major depression or other mood disturbances.
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