Many Teenage Girls
Underestimate STD Risk
Excerpt by Merritt McKinney, Reuters Health

Teenage girls who have unprotected sex and engage in other risky sexual behavior may underestimate their odds of getting a sexually transmitted disease, the results of a new study suggest.

"Most young women in this study, who were all sexually active and who demonstrated risk for STDs, did not perceive that they were at risk for infection," Dr. Kathleen A. Ethier, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, told Reuters Health.

The study included 209 sexually active teen girls, most of whom were African American or Latina.

Over the course of 18 months, almost one out of four adolescent girls in the study were diagnosed with chlamydia or gonorrhea, even though "most of those had predicted that there was little or no chance of that happening," the investigators report.

In fact, about 89 percent of the girls felt that they were at little to no risk of getting an STD. This may have been wishful thinking, since 74 percent of the girls reported engaging in risky sex, having symptoms of an STD or having had an STD in the past.

Each girl's risk factors for STDs, including unprotected sex and multiple sexual partners, had little effect on her perception of risk, according to the report in the October issue of the journal Sexually Transmitted Infections.

"Adolescents may either be uninformed about or ignoring their risk for sexually transmitted diseases," according to Ethier.

Young people may know the facts about risk factors for STDs, but some may not connect that information to their own behavior, Ethier said. Even when they engage in risky behavior, "many adolescents still feel that it can't happen to them," she noted.

"That is clearly a dangerous assumption," she said.

What remains unclear, according to Ethier, are the reasons the young women in the study did not think that they were at risk.

There are several possible explanations, she said, including their relationships with male partners and the attitudes of people in their communities. She noted, however, that the current study did not look at these issues.

"We need to know more about why adolescents are not accurately assessing their risk for infection," Ethier said. Without a clear understanding of why the problem is occurring, it will be difficult to design programs to tackle the problem, she said.

SOURCE: Sexually Transmitted Infections, October 2003.

Reference Source 89

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