Health, Fertility a Time Bomb for Young Women
The list includes binge drinking, smoking, illicit drug use, increased rates of sexually transmitted infections, lack of exercise and dangerous eating habits.
Melbourne adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said the alarming trends were occurring in girls and young women between the ages of 10 and 24. His findings are based on a review of current studies, including the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health, and published in the Medical Journal of Australia.
"The level of risk taking seems to be getting both more prevalent and the age of onset seems to be dropping," Dr Carr-Gregg said. He said marijuana use, which had doubled in the past three years, and increasing rates of binge drinking, set today's young women apart from their mothers' generation.
Seventy percent of young women engaged in binge drinking at some time, with 19 per cent doing so weekly and a third of 12-to-13-year-olds binge drinking fortnightly.
Twenty percent of females aged 18 to 23 were regular smokers, as were 6 percent of 12-year-olds and 30 percent of 17-year-olds. Twice as many teenage girls had used illicit drugs as their male peers, with 2.5 percent of 14-to-19-year-olds having used cocaine and 2.3 percent heroin.
Most young women were a healthy weight, but 74 per cent wanted to weigh less and a third of underweight women reported wanting to slim further.
Despite high rates of binge eating, purging and dieting, only half of young women exercised to recommended levels. Dr Carr-Gregg said young women were a ticking public health time bomb.
He said much of the behavior was symptomatic of deeper psychological problems and suggested that the focus on boys' academic performance had skewed the debate away from health issues for young women. "Yes girls are doing better than boys but... there are a lot of extremely unhappy, confused and misinformed young women out there." (The Age, June 16, 2003)