Parents who find a sex-based text on their teenager’s phone should be on the lookout for other problems in their child’s life, a new evidence review suggests.

Teens who share sexually explicit images are much more likely to be involved in other troubling activities, including unsafe sex, alcohol and drugs.

Troubling findings

“The kids who are sexting are engaging in a lot of other risky behaviours,” said senior researcher Sheri Madigan, a child development expert from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.

“We found that youths who were sexting were approximately four times more likely to be also engaging in sexual intercourse, five times more likely to have multiple sexual partners, and half as likely to be using contraception,” she continued.

Also, sexting teens were:

• Twice as likely to have symptoms of depression and anxiety.
• Two and a half times more likely to be smoking or engaging in delinquent behaviours like stealing or vandalism.
• More than three times as likely to be using alcohol or drugs.

But the findings are particularly troubling in light of a 2018 study led by Madigan that found one out of four teens is receiving sexts, and one out of seven is sending them.

Other risky behaviours

Results from the new review line up with what is already known about teens and sexting, said Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center at Florida Atlantic University.

“Many risky behaviours among youth tend to occur in a constellation,” he said. “If a teen experiments with one risky behaviour, that teen typically has experience with other risky behaviours.”

For this study, Madigan and her colleagues collected and combined data from 23 previous studies on sexting, involving nearly 42 000 teenagers.

They found significant links between sexting and sexual activity, risky sexual behaviour, symptoms of mood disorders, drug and alcohol use, smoking and delinquency.

Further, they found that associations between sexting and either sexual behaviour or mood disorders were stronger in younger adolescents, compared to those in their later teens.

It’s not clear whether sexting leads to these behaviours, or whether kids inclined to take risks are also more likely to sext, the researchers added. They noted the findings could not prove causation; it only showed an association.

What parents should do

It’s very possible that sexting is a gateway that could lead to more experimentation with sex, Madigan said.

“I think sometimes sexting is an initiation into greater sexual behaviour,” she said. “Sometimes kids use sexting as a starting point. People have called it the modern-day version of flirting.”

But other research also has found that when teens are sexting within the confines of a committed relationship, they are not more likely to be engaging in substance abuse and other risk-taking activities, Madigan added.

Those associations are more often found in “youth who are sexting as a method of flirting or sexting in a more casual way”, she said.

So what should parents do?

Hazing and cyberbullying expert Susan Lipkins said the “pat answer” is to remind children that anything they share over the internet is out of their control and could be used against them.

Kids will do what they want

Parents should start teaching their kids about privacy and consent as early as possible, even before they have a phone, she and Madigan advised.

Such conversations should include discussion of “what-if” scenarios, Madigan said: What if someone sends you a photo? What if you’re asked to send a nude of yourself? What if someone tries to coerce you into sexting? What if you share a nude with a boyfriend or girlfriend and then you break up?

“But the truth is, the kids will learn all that, they will memorise it and repeat it back to you, and then they will do whatever they want,” said Lipkins, a psychologist in Port Washington, New York.

The best thing adults can do is create a system for reporting sexts and other cyberbullying behaviour, one that is anonymous and allows for verification of complaints, she said.

Otherwise, it’s really in the hands of the teens themselves, she added.

“The kids themselves have to decide they don’t want to participate,” Lipkins said. “‘We’re not going to pass that photo along. No, I don’t want it on my device. No, I don’t want to get in trouble for having it. No, it is inappropriate, it is disrespectful to whomever, and I’m not going to participate in this behaviour.’ When they can say that and protect each other and themselves, that’s when it’s going to end.”

The new report was published in JAMA Pediatrics.

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Is that second serving of steak or extra strip of bacon worth shaving time off your life?

That’s a question researchers want you to ponder, because their new study finds the more red and processed meat you eat, the greater the odds of cutting your life short.

Lower risk of mortality

People who increased their red meat intake by just half a serving a day boosted their risk of dying over the next eight years by 10%, the study authors said.

And the type of meat made a difference, the investigators found. Eating a half serving more of processed meats like hot dogs and salami was tied to a 13% higher risk of dying early, while more unprocessed meat increased the risk 9%.

“When people reduce their consumption of red meat and add other sources of protein, they have a lower risk of mortality,” said lead researcher Dr Frank Hu.

Hu is chair of the nutrition department at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.

The good news: Cutting down on red meat and adding vegetables, eggs, dairy, seeds, whole grains, nuts, fish and chicken to your diet will add years to your life, he said.

The study found that replacing one serving of red meat with fish every day over eight years was tied to a 17% lower risk of death over the next eight years.

Lower meat consumption

“We also know that red meat production has a significant environmental impact,” Hu said. “To improve both human health and the environment, it’s important to adopt a healthy diet that emphasises less meat consumption.”

For the study, Hu and his colleagues collected data on nearly 54 000 women who took part in the Nurses’ Health Study and almost 28 000 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, starting in 1986.

The researchers looked at meat intake over eight years and the risk of dying in the following eight years.

Eating more red meat was tied to a higher risk of death from cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and neurodegenerative disease, the findings showed.

The risk remained for all participants regardless of age, physical activity, dietary quality, smoking or alcohol.

Evidence has shown that consuming red and processed meat increases the risk for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and certain cancers, Hu said.

A more plant-based diet

The life-shortening effect of red meat may be due to increased cholesterol, iron, preservatives and cancer-causing compounds that are produced when meat is cooked at high temperatures, he noted.

In addition, red meat has been tied to certain bacteria in the gut that might increase the odds for atherosclerosis, Hu said.

Despite the evidence, some people still cling to the idea that humans are meant to eat meat, said Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist at NYU Langone Medical Center, in New York City.

“Dismayed meat eaters say that humans are born carnivores and that meat is the only good source of protein, neither of which is necessarily true,” Heller noted.

The human body is not designed to withstand the large portions and long-term consumption of meat seen in developed countries, she explained. It doesn’t matter if the animal is grass-fed or the meat is organic.

“One can easily meet their protein needs with a more plant-based diet, consuming foods such as nuts, legumes, grains, vegetables and seeds,” she suggested.

Confounding factors

“Eating more plant foods and fewer foods from animals helps to reduce the risk of many chronic diseases and mortality,” Heller said.

A spokesperson for the beef industry disagreed with that assessment.

“Beef provides high-quality protein and nutrients essential to growth and strength from infancy through our later years,” said Shalene McNeill, executive director of human nutrition research of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

McNeill said the study had limitations. It looked at the diets of health professionals from more than 20 years ago, “who were eating nearly twice the amount of red meat eaten on average today,” she noted.

“Additionally, study participants whose red meat intake was unstable also had lower levels of physical activity and were more likely to smoke,” McNeill said.

“These confounding factors make it impossible to show cause and effect when it comes to eating red meat and health outcomes,” McNeill added.

The report was published online in the BMJ.

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So-called “deaths of despair” are skyrocketing among millennials, with thousands of 18- to 34-year-olds losing their lives to drugs, alcohol and suicide each year, a new report says.

During the past decade, drug-related deaths among that age group increased by 108%, alcohol-induced deaths by 69%, and suicides by 35%, according to the report from the Trust for America’s Health and Well Being Trust.

A call to action

Millennials are more heavily affected than older generations by each of these causes of death, the report states:

• In 2017, there were nearly 31 drug overdose deaths for every 100 000 18- to 34-year-olds, but fewer than 23 drug deaths per 100 000 across all age groups.
• Alcohol-induced death rates doubled for millennials between 1999 and 2007.
• Young adults experienced a 35% increase in suicide rates between 2007 and 2017, compared with a 14% increase for 35- to 54-year-olds; a 24% increase for those 55 to 74; and 14% uptick for people older than 75.

“We lost over 150 000 lives last year to drugs, alcohol and suicide. When we dive down deep into those data, the millennial generation just pops out,” said Benjamin Miller, chief strategy officer of Well Being Trust, a national foundation focused on mental, social and spiritual health.

“This is a call to action,” Miller said of the new report. “It’s unacceptable for us to continue to lose as many lives as we are losing to preventable causes. We have to do something different. What we are doing is simply not working.”

The opioid epidemic cannot be overlooked as a contributing factor, Miller said.

Opioid overdose death rates among millennials increased by more than 500% between 1999 and 2017, and deaths caused by synthetic opioids increased by a staggering 6 000%.

Dark psyche of millennials

It’s a terrible coincidence that millennials came of age “at a time when the medical profession was led down the wrong path in terms of opioid prescribing,” said Dr Andrew Saxon, director of the Addiction Psychiatry Residency Program at the University of Washington in Seattle.

But the increases in alcohol deaths and suicides point to something darker within the psyche of millennials, who typically are defined as people born between 1981 and 1996.

They grew up with a succession of shattering events for the United States – the 9/11 terror attacks, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the Great Recession prompted by the housing bubble, Saxon said.

They graduated college saddled with heavy student debt at a time “our economy was near collapse”, he said. “The expectations that they would have jobs waiting for them and their skills would be wanted – sort of suddenly all of those prospects disappeared.”

Since then, they’ve had to grapple with the exploding costs of education and housing.

“We can track economic trends with suicides, and as long as we’ve been studying it, suicides have gone up during times of economic dislocation,” Saxon said.

Negative effects of social media

Miller, meanwhile, said the rise of social media likely has also had an impact on millennials’ sense of their prospects.

Social media can “make them feel more lonely – how come I don’t have that, or how come no one likes my picture?” he said. “In those cases, the negative effects of social media are seen.”

At the same time, mental health services continue to be doled out in a way that makes it unlikely many will get the help they need, Miller said.

“We know that six in 10 folks are seeking mental health care, yet if you look at the data, 96 million Americans last year had to wait over a week to get access to a mental health provider,” Miller said.

“When someone says to you that you’re going to have to come back next week or tomorrow or in two weeks, the likelihood you show up is relatively small,” he added.

To help stem these deaths of despair, the report recommends:

• Making mental health care, including screenings for substance use and depression, a routine part of primary care.
• Improving insurance coverage for medication-based treatments for substance abuse.
• Adopting pricing strategies to reduce alcohol consumption among teens and young adults.
• Offering suicide prevention programmes throughout the health care system.
• Making sure hospitals connect patients in crisis with behavioural health services in a timely manner.

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No parent wants their child to suffer a dog bite, and new research offers some guidance on which dogs are the riskiest around young kids.

The body size and head shape of dogs affect the bite and injury risk they pose, the researchers found.

Weight and head shape

For the study, the investigators examined 15 years of visits for facial dog bites at two emergency departments, and more than 45 years of data from different dog bite studies.

“Because we often didn’t know what type of dog was involved in these incidents, we looked at things like weight and head shape,” explained study author Dr Garth Essig, an otolaryngologist at Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center, in Columbus.

“We wanted to provide families with data to help them determine the risk to their children and inform them on which types of dogs do well in households with kids,” Essig explained in a medical centre news release.

Certain dog breeds are known to be more likely to bite and to cause more serious injuries, but the breed was unknown in about 60% of dog bite cases analysed by the researchers.

Bite injuries from pit bulls were the most frequent and most severe, followed by mixed-breed dogs and German shepherds, the findings showed.

The researchers also identified the physical traits of dogs that pose a higher bite and injury risk.

Children more at risk

For example, dogs weighing more than 30kg and those with more of a square-shaped head – such as a chow chow or pug – were more likely to bite and cause serious injury.

Each year in the United States, nearly five million people suffer dog bites, and children have a much higher risk than adults.

Children should be taught how to safely interact with dogs, the study authors said.

Meghan Herron is an associate professor of clinical services at Ohio State’s College of Veterinary Medicine. She explained that “people often think that leaning forward and reaching out their hand for the dog to smell is the right thing to do, but in reality that can actually be threatening to the dog”.

Herron suggested that, “instead, ask the dog owner for permission to pet their dog, then turn to the side, crouch down on your knees, pat your leg and let the dog come to you.”

The study findings were published recently in the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology.

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Being an Instagram influencer isn’t always a good thing.

New research found that vulnerable young people who see online posts of self-harm – like cutting – may copy those destructive behaviours.

Almost one-third of teens and young adults who reported seeing self-harm posts on Instagram said they had performed the same or similar self-harming behaviour afterwards.

Seeing these images online “normalises” the behaviour, according study senior author Dan Romer. He’s research director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Vulnerable kids think, ‘Well, maybe that’s something I should consider doing,'” he said.

Romer noted that this problem goes beyond just Instagram. “Kids who don’t have mental health problems wouldn’t repeatedly self-harm. It’s vulnerable kids trying to relieve their distress,” he explained. But he added that this study indicates that these types of social media posts can be harmful to teens and young adults.

The researchers initially became concerned about the potential effects of self-harm posts after a British father said his 14-year-old daughter had looked at explicit self-harming images on Instagram before killing herself. The social media site has since said that graphic depictions of self-harm aren’t allowed in posts.

Self-harm typically refers to cutting, but can include other behaviours such as burning, hitting or head-banging. Self-harm isn’t usually suicidal, but people who engage in self-harm are at increased risk for suicide, the researchers said. Posts depicting self-harm on Instagram commonly show mild or moderate injuries. But some posts included bleeding flesh wounds from cutting an extremity.

Instagram has more than 500 million daily active users and more than 1 billion monthly users, according to the researchers. The social media site is very popular with young people.

Accidental exposure

The study included more than 700 teens and young adults (ages 18 to 29). Eighty percent of the study volunteers were women. They were interviewed twice, a month apart. The interviews occurred in May and June 2018, before Instagram said it would try to reduce graphic self-harm posts.

Almost half – 43% – said they had seen at least one self-harm post on Instagram. Many reported seeing more than one such post. Most – 80% – of those who reported seeing these posts said their exposure to them was accidental.

Almost two out of the three people surveyed said that the self-harm posts were emotionally disturbing.

Six out of 10 who saw these posts said they thought about how it might feel to do something like that. And 33% of those exposed to the self-harm posts said at the first interview that they had done the same or similar harm to themselves as a result of seeing the post.

During the second interview a month later, people who said they’d seen a self-harm post during the first interview were more likely to have self-harmed than people who hadn’t seen such a post.

Romer noted that the study cannot prove that seeing the posts directly led people to self-harm.

But, he said, “Kids who see these posts and are vulnerable probably aren’t going to get a good message.”

Communication with parents crucial

Romer said parents need to be concerned if they notice behaviours linked to depression in their kids, such as being online all the time, isolating themselves and sadness. These are kids that might be more susceptible to things they see online.

Since it’s nearly impossible to completely ban access to social media, Romer said open communication with parents is even more crucial for today’s young people.

Dr Alan Geller, a psychiatrist at NewYork-Presbyterian’s Gracie Square Hospital in New York City, agreed that communication is key.

“Adolescents have to understand your limits and expectations,” said Geller, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It’s like limit-setting for anything – alcohol or cigarettes or, now, marijuana. Children and teens have access to these risks and parents have a responsibility to set limits and clearly communicate those limits.”

And, he said, parents need to routinely check in with their teens about these challenges. Geller suggested doing so at least once a week.

Like Romer, Geller said that parents need to be on the lookout for signs, including repeated self-harm, that a teen or young adult is depressed or suicidal. If parents or other loved ones have concerns, teens and young adults should see a psychologist or psychiatrist for help.

The study was published online in New Media and Society.

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