Tags : teens
Study: Young Adults Risky Behavior Goes Up, Prevntative Care Goes Down
Rochester, NY (AHN) – When adolescents emerge into young adulthood, their preventive care tends to diminish. A recent study has found that young adults are much less likely to use ambulatory or preventive care, even though their mortality rate is more than twice that of adolescents.
“Young adults are generally a healthy population, but many risky behaviors peak in young adulthood and few resources are available for this population,” said Robert J.Fortuna, M.D., M.P.H., in a statement. He is senior instructor in Pediatrics and Internal Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC).
“Despite having the highest rate of many preventable diseases, young adults garner relatively little attention from advocacy groups, researchers or policymakers,” Fortuna added.
Before the study was published in the most recent bi-monthly edition of Annals of Internal Medicine, little was known about how young adults use ambulatory care. The study’s findings provide a new focus on health care in young adulthood and dissect cross cultural and gender ambulatory patterns and preventative care.
Fortuna conducted the study with two other URMC researchers, Brett W. Robbins, M.D., associate professor in Pediatrics and Internal Medicine, and Jill S. Halterman, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor in Pediatrics and ascertained that young adults, especially black and Hispanic males, underused ambulatory medical care and infrequently receive preventive care.
Researchers found that young men had nearly half the preventive care visits compared with adolescents (age 15 to 19 years) and older adults (age 30 to 39 years). Young men also had less than one-fourth the rate of preventive care visits than young women did. On average, young men were seen less than once every 9 years for preventive care and young men without insurance were seen once every 25 years, according to the study.
Young black and Hispanic men received less care in general than young white men and half the amount of care for chronic conditions compared to white men. Further socioeconomic evidence of this trend is young adults are the most likely age group to be uninsured, with nearly one-third lacking medical coverage. The study found that young adults without insurance had one-fourth as many visits as those with insurance.
Despite health practitioners having positive results from counseling on tobacco cessation, modifying high-risk sexual behaviors, etc the prevalence and instance of young adults being targeted for preventative counseling remains infrequent.
Additionally, researcher’s findings show that when young adults were offered counseling, which occurred at about one third of all ambulatory care visits, they infrequently received counseling directed at the greatest threats to their health.
What the study shows is that young adults are most often bombarded with counseling related to exercise and diet, rather than more immediate threats to their health. Specifically tobacco use, alcohol use, illicit drug use and STDs are more pressing health related issues for young adults than both teenagers and older adults.
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