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Targeting teen health

The University's experts in adolescent health have made it their mission to help teens survive these risk-filled years

BY JEANNE METTNER

If you are reading this page, you have lived it: The hormone-driven emotional highs and lows. The risk and resilience. The vulnerability and invincibility. The rite of passage that Carol Burnett called "one big walking pimple."

It's adolescence, and it's no joke. In 2003, motor vehicle accidents, homicide, and suicide were the three leading causes of death among individuals aged 10 to 24 — or 57 percent of all deaths in that age group, according to the National Adolescent Health Information Center. One in five 12th graders reported using cigarettes or taking drugs, and one in four said they were binge drinking. A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that the teen birthrate has increased for the first time since 1991.

Not surprisingly, experts in the University of Minnesota Medical School's Division of Adolescent Health and Medicine will tell you that the teen years demand health-care professionals' undivided attention.

"Members of this age group are not dying primarily of tumors and infectious diseases. They are dying of drinking while driving, accidents, depression, drugs, and violence," says Nimi Singh, M.D., M.P.H., head of the adolescent medicine division and assistant professor of pediatrics. "If 80 percent of what kills people between ages 11 and 21 is emotional and behavioral, any clinician who is providing care for that population has to be looking for warning signs."

Nimi Singh, M.D., M.P.H.

Nimi Singh, M.D., M.P.H., head of the Department of Pediatrics's adolescent medicine division, teaches the importance of screening adolescent patients for emotional and behavioral problems and providing them with healthy coping strategies. Photo: Scott Streble

Singh and her colleagues have made it their mission to help teens survive these risk-filled years, and the team is training new physicians to think differently about the way they provide care for these uniquely challenging patients.

Says Singh: "We want clinicians to pick up on when a teenager is upset about a negative interaction at school, for instance, so they can help that teen learn to cope with the event emotionally rather than have him or her show up in the ER six months later because the social fallout became too much to handle.

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