Today's teenagers 'are less healthy than their parents'

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 teenagers' health are preventable.

Between 1970 and 2000, obesity in adolescents has increased fourfold; sexually transmitted diseases have increased threefold; teenage pregnancy rates in Britain are the highest in Europe (despite a recent fall); drinking has increased; smoking rates are unchanged since 1982; and suicide is slightly up in the 30-year period (despite a recent decrease), figures show. The trends are highlighted in a series of papers on adolescent health published by The Lancet today, which the journal says is an area of medicine that remains "neglected, marginalised or ignored".

Adolescence is the time when teenagers start smoking, drinking and having sex - behaviour which could have a huge impact on their long-term health, the journal said. But, it added, the opportunity to intervene was being missed.

Speaking at the launch of the series in London yesterday, 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.

"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 We have less old fashioned infectious disease, but it has been replaced by social causes of death and illness which are causing significant health problems that weren't there 40 years ago," Dr Viner said.

"[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 behaviour leading to injuries, mental disorders and suicides.

Dr Viner said: "There is a very large gap after puberty when young people don't have the institutions of adulthood to control those behaviours until they are into their twenties.

"We need to rethink all the age limits. The age 18 is graven in stone, but there is little biological validity for it. Young people should be able to vote at 16 - the majority have well developed abstract thinking. But maybe some age limits should go up."

Glenn Bowes, a professor of paediatrics at the University of Melbourne, Australia, said adolescents were at particular risk from the drinks 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," he said.