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Teens Living in Poor Areas at Risk for Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI)

May 30, 2013

Teens Living in Poor Areas at Risk for Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI)

Jodi Ford, assistant professor of nursing is lead author of a new study finding that adolescents living in neighborhoods rife with poverty are at an increased risk of getting the sexually transmitted infection (STI) chlamydia in young adulthood. Ford conducted the research with Christopher Browning, professor of sociology.

Ford and Browning accessed data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to conduct the analysis. The sample they studied included data from three separate interviews of 11,460 youths who participated in the national project. When they were first interviewed, the average age of the children studied was 15.6 years; by the time of the third interview, these same participants were between 18 and 27 years old.

Ford and Browning’s analysis suggested that children who lived in poor neighborhoods during their teenage years had an almost 25 percent greater risk of having chlamydia in their early 20s – even if they themselves weren’t poor – than did teenagers living in wealthier settings.

The effect of living in an impoverished neighborhood on the risk for later infection was unaffected by other known STI risk factors, such as depression, having multiple sex partners or beginning sexual activity at a very young age.

The researchers considered four characteristics from U.S. Census data from corresponding years to determine whether the youths lived in poor neighborhoods as teenagers: proportion of households below poverty, proportion of households on public assistance, total unemployment rate and proportion of female-headed households with children.

Both Ford and Browning are affiliated with the Institute for Population Research (IPR).

Browning’s research focuses on a number of topics related to the neighborhood context of health including adolescent sexual risk behavior, racial disparities in health outcomes, and the social context of aging and health. He is principal investigator of a NICHD funded project investigating HIV risk behavior among urban adolescents and co-investigator of a NIH grant examining the relationship between neighborhoods and older adult health.

This study, Neighborhoods and Infectious Disease Risk: Acquisition of Chlamydia during the Transition to Young Adulthood, is published in a recent issue of the Journal of Urban Health.

Read the entire press release, courtesy of Emily Caldwell, assistant director, Ohio State Research and Innovation Communications.

Read the latest news stories on Ford and Browning's research: ScienceDaily, The Times of India, and The Global Dispatch.

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