Privacy concerns keep some young people from sexual health services
Young people may abstain from seeking sexual and reproductive health care because they fear their parents will find out, a U.S. government report suggests.
About 7 percent of teens and young adults said they would not seek that care due to confidentiality concerns, the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) reported Friday.
The youngest teens expressed the greatest reluctance. Almost one in five 15- to 17-year-olds said they would not seek that care because their parents could find out, according to the report.
It is concerning, said Casey Copen, an NCHS health scientist and lead author of the report. The NCHS is part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC estimates that 15- to 24-year-olds account for half of all cases of sexually transmitted diseases in the United States.
Its important that we monitor any barriers that youth may experience to obtaining health care, Copen said.
The report provides data from two new measures of confidentiality included in a nationally representative household survey involving face-to-face interviews.
Copen said these questions were added to get a sense of young peoples confidentiality concerns and any barriers to sexual and reproductive health care.
The survey revealed that young women with confidentiality concerns were less likely to receive sexual and reproductive health services in the past year compared to those without such concerns. Among females aged 18 to 25, for example, 53 percent with concerns received these services, compared with nearly 73 percent of those without such worries.
Among males, there were no large differences in the percentages receiving sexual and reproductive services based on confidentiality concerns.
Abigail English is director of the Center for Adolescent Health the Law in Chapel Hill, N.C. She said the new report is extremely important and useful because it confirms findings from older and smaller studies and provides new data.
HealthDay
