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Objective: Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for teens. Previous teen and adult crash rates have been based upon fatal crashes, police-reported crashes, and estimated miles driven. Large-scale naturalistic driving studies offer the opportunity to compute crash rates using a reliable methodology to capture crashes and driving exposure. The Strategic Highway Research Program 2 (SHRP2) Naturalistic Driving Study contains extensive real-world data on teen and adult driving. This article presents findings on the crash rates of novice teen and experienced adult drivers in naturalistic crashes.Methods: A subset from the SHRP2 database consisting of 539 crash events for novice teens (16-19 years, n = 549) and experienced adults (35-54 years, n = 591) was used. Onboard instrumentation such as scene cameras, accelerometers, and Global Positioning System logged time series data at 10 Hz. Scene videos were reviewed for all events to identify rear-end striking crashes. Dynamic variables such as acceleration and velocity were analyzed for rear-end striking events. Number of crashes, crash rates, rear-end striking crash severity, and rear-end striking impact velocity were compared between novice teens and experienced adults.Results: Video review of the SHRP2 crashes identified significantly more crashes (P < 0.01) and rear-end striking crashes (P < 0.01) among the teen group than among the adult group. This yielded crash rates of 30.0 crashes per million miles driven for novice teens compared to 5.3 crashes per million miles driven for experienced adults. The crash rate ratio for teens vs. adults was 5.7. The rear-end striking crash rate was 13.5 and 1.8 per million miles driven for novice teens and experienced adults, respectively. The rear-end striking crash rate ratio for teens vs. adults was 7.5. The rear-end striking crash severity measured by the accelerometers was greater (P < 0.05) for the teen group (1.8 ± 0.9 g; median = 1.6 g) than for the adult group (1.1 ± 0.4 g; median = 1.0 g), suggesting that teen crashes tend to be more serious than adult crashes. Increased rear-end striking impact velocity (P < 0.01) was also observed for novice teens (18.8 ± 13.2 mph; median = 18.9 mph) compared to experienced adults (3.3 ± 1.2 mph; median = 2.8 mph).Conclusion: To our knowledge, this is the first study to compare crash rates between teens and adults using a large-scale naturalistic driving database. Unlike previous crash rates, the reported rates reliably control for crash type and driving exposure. These results conform to previous findings that novice teens exhibit increased crash rates compared to experienced adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlabelled: Utilizing Add Health longitudinal data, we compared 21 male suicide casualties to 10,101 living respondents identifying suicide correlates.Method: 21 suicide decedents completed surveys in 1994/1995 (Wave 1) and 11 completed at Wave 3; responses were compared with Chi-square and oneway ANOVA tests.Results: Suicide decedents were prone to higher delinquency and fighting at Wave 1, but not at Wave 3. At Wave 1 suicide decedents remained undistinguished from living respondents in depression, self-esteem, and drug uses. Yet, after Wave 3, the 11 respondents dying by suicide showed significantly higher depression, drug use and lower self-esteem.Conclusion: Delinquency trends can readily understood, but more complex causes are needed to account for unexpected changes in self-esteem, depression and drug uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most previous research regarding early death prior to, or during, young adulthood among previously detained delinquent youth has focused predominantly on males or on their cause of death. This study extends previous research by evaluating potential factors that are associated with early death in a random sample (N = 999) of formerly detained youthful offenders in New York stratified by gender (50% female). Existing case records were referenced with the National Death Index to determine if the formerly detained youth were deceased by the time they would have reached age 28. Regression analyses were run to determine if any of 16 sociodemographic, offense history, weapons/gang involvement, mental health, substance use, child maltreatment, child welfare, or family environmental risk factors measured in their childhood or adolescence were associated with early death. Two additional regression analyses were run to determine if those risk factors differentially impacted early death for males vs. females. Of the variables measured, however, only gender was significantly related to early death – compared to females, males were 2.3 times more likely to have prematurely died. Additionally, in the model run separately for females, being an African-American female was protective against early death. These findings are compared to findings from the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The major causes of adolescent morbidity and mortality are lifestyle related and are all amenable to intervention through counselling. In order to identify concerning health behaviours, physicians must be skilled in appropriately assuring confidentiality and in obtaining the social history. To assess internal medicine residents' perceived preparedness to care for adolescents, particularly with regard to counselling on adolescent-specific health issues, a survey assessing these skill sets was administered to senior internal medicine residents at two university-affiliated programmes. Senior residents surveyed feel uncomfortable counselling on 94% of the adolescent health issues assessed. Nonetheless, 60% are willing to care for adolescents in the future, and 75% are interested in additional residency training in adolescent medicine. Despite exposure to adolescent patients during residency training and an expressed interest in adolescent medicine, residents are poorly prepared to care for adolescent patients. Future curriculum development should focus on increasing the opportunities to directly care for adolescents, during which residents can practice and develop the interviewing and counselling skills necessary for care of adolescent patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A multivariate model was developed incorporating various socio-demographic, social-environmental, and social-psychological factors in an attempt to predict suicidal ideation among Canadian youth. The main research objective sought to determine what socially based factors elevate or reduce suicidal ideation within this population. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth-Cycle 5 (2003), a cross-sectional sample of 1,032 was used to empirically identify various social determinants of suicidal ideation among youth between the ages of 12 and 15. Results reveal statistically significant correlations between suicide ideation and some lesser examined socially based measures. In particular, ability to communicate feelings, negative attachment to parents/guardians, taunting/bullying or abuse, and presence of deviant peers were significant predictors of suicidal ideation. As expected, depression/anxiety, gender, and age were also correlated with thoughts of suicide. Research findings should help foster a better understanding toward the social elements of suicide and provide insight into how suicide prevention strategies may be improved through an increased emphasis on substance use education, direct targeting of dysfunctional families and deviant peer groups, and exploring more avenues of self-expression for youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objectives of the study were to estimate mortality rate trends due to road traffic, drowning and fire/burns in children aged 0-14 years and in adolescents aged 15-19 years in Lithuania between the years 1971-2005. The data were obtained from Statistics Lithuania and the Health Information Centre. Trends were estimated by linear and polynomial regression. The study revealed that the child and adolescent unintentional injury mortality rates show declining trends. For children, the significant decreasing trends of mortality rates due to road traffic, drowning and fire/burns were observed. For adolescents there were significant decreasing trends for drowning deaths, and insignificant decreasing tendencies for deaths from fire/burns. There was an insignificant increased road traffic mortality rate trend for adolescent girls. For the adolescent boys group and for boys and girls together from the beginning of the study period there were increasing trends, followed by declining trends. In the last years, the increase was observed again. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide as a cause of death among adolescents and migration as a component of population have been growing in importance. Very little research has been conducted on the connections between migration and suicidality among adolescents in Hong Kong, and so is the aim of this article. It uses census and registration data to study suicide mortality, and sample survey data collected for this purpose to investigate suicide attempt, suicide ideation, and self-injurious behavior. Relations between suicidality and socio-demographic/psychological factors replicated those found in the literature. Duration of residence was found important for the study of suicide among migrants. In both the bivariate and multivariate analyses, although the suicidality levels for short-duration (less than 10 years) adolescent migrants were very much lower than the local-born counterparts, those for the long-duration (10 years or more) migrants were very much higher. The findings support the Healthy Migrant Hypothesis and other related hypotheses in migrant mortality studies. They also reveal, in the light of the Integration Theory of Suicide, the problem of migrant integration into the host culture and society, an important social problem for the government to solve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]