(Press-News.org) High school students subjected to bullying and other forms of harassment are more likely to report being seriously depressed, consider suicide and carry weapons to school, according to findings from a trio of studies reported at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting in San Diego.
"Teens can be the victim of face-to-face bullying in school, electronic bullying outside of the classroom and dating violence," said Andrew Adesman, MD, senior investigator of all three studies. "Each of these experiences are associated with a range of serious adverse consequences."
All three studies were based on data collected by the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) as part of its 2013 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System - a biannual questionnaire of teens in grades 9-12 in all 50 states that is constructed to provide a representative sample of high school students in the United States.
A Look at Depression and Suicide
In a study on bullying based on the CDC's survey of high school students in the United States, Dr. Adesman's team reports that depression and suicide are much more common in teens who have been the victim of bullying in school and/or electronically. Moreover, these risks were additive among teens who were the victim of both forms of bullying. Their study, "Relative Risks of Depression and Suicidal Tendency among Victims of School- and Electronic-Bullying with Co-Risk Factors", presents results from the first national analysis comparing risks associated with the different forms of bullying.
"Although cyber bullying may not pose the same physical threat that face-to-face bullying does, it can be far more hurtful since it can spread like wildfire throughout a student body and take on a life of its own," Dr. Adesman said.
Tammy Pham, the principal investigator, said it was very important to create more effective strategies to prevent bullying in all forms." "Students need to feel safe both in and outside of school," she said. "More needs to be done to reduce bullying and the huge toll it takes on youth."
Ms. Pham will present "Relative Risks of Depression and Suicidal Tendency among Victims of School- and Electronic-Bullying With Co-Risk Factors" as a platform presentation on Monday, April 27, at 12pm in Room 28D at the Convention Center.
Bullying Impacts School Attendance, Weapon Carrying
In a second study of bullying, "Victimization of High School Students: Impact on School Attendance and Weapon Carrying Behaviors", the investigators found that bullying, physical dating violence and/or sexual dating violence were each associated with teens not attending school or carrying weapons to school.
"Tragically, teens who were victimized in more than one way were especially likely to carry a weapon to school or skip school altogether," said Dr. Adesman, chief of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at Cohen Children's Medical Center in New Hyde Park, NY.
Alexis Tchaconas, the principal investigator of this study, said that bullying and dating violence were more common than many might expect."The CDC reports that 11 percent of high school students experience dating violence, and 20 percent report being bullied," she said. "Greater prevention efforts are needed to protect the mental health and physical well-being of our teens".
"Victimization of High School Students: Impact on School Attendance and Weapon Carrying Behaviors" will be a poster presentation on Monday, April 27th from 4:15 -7:30 PM. It is in poster session No. 3906 in Exhibit Hall EFG at the Convention Center.
Who's Carrying Weapons to School?
The third study focused on teens who were victims of bullying in the past 12 months and investigated whether there are gender differences in the association of carrying a weapon to school.
On the one hand, boys were overall more likely to carry a weapon to school than girls, regardless of victim status. On the other hand, girls who were the victims of bullying were more than three times as likely to carry a weapon as girls who were not victimized; by contrast, male victims were less than twice as likely to carry a weapon compared to male non-victims.
"The prevalence of school bullying has serious implications for the safety of all students -- both the victims of bullying and the non-victims," said Ms. Pham, the principal investigator of this study.
"Girls who have been victimized are much more likely to carry a weapon; unfortunately, the CDC data does not tell us if this is for their own protection or to seek revenge," said Dr. Adesman, the senior investigator. "Effective strategies need to be developed to eliminate bullying if we want our teens to be safe and enjoy their adolescence."
INFORMATION:
"Gender Differences in Risk of Weapon-Carrying By Adolescents Who Are Victims of Bullying" will be a poster presentation on Monday, April 27th from 4:15 -7:30 PM. It is in poster session #3906 in Exhibit Hall EFG at the Convention Center.
"Bullying and dating violence are too important to ignore as risk factors for suicide - the third leading cause of death in teens," Dr. Adesman said when asked about the important lesson from these studies.
To schedule an interview with Dr. Adesman before or during the PAS meeting, call 516-232-5229 or email Adesman@lij.edu.
No outside funding was received for this research.
About the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York
Opened in 1983, the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Children's Medical Center of New York is home to about 675 pediatricians, including 200 full-time physicians, and a total workforce of more than 1,200, including more than 500 nurses. For the eighth consecutive year in 2014, CCMC was ranked among the best children's hospitals in the nation in U.S. News & World Report's 2014-15 "America's Best Children's Hospitals" survey.
WASHINGTON -- Researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center and American University have shown that, like humans, mustached bats use the left and right sides of their brains to process different aspects of sounds. Aside from humans, no other animal that has been studied, not even monkeys or apes, has proved to use such hemispheric specialization for sound processing -- meaning that the left brain is better at processing fast sounds, and the right processing slow ones.
The scientists say their study, published in Frontiers of Neuroscience, opens a pathway to ...
A new smoking-specific survey has been developed that is much better than a currently available general health questionnaire at discriminating between different types of 'otherwise healthy' smokers. This test could be useful in determining the potential health impact of next generation tobacco and nicotine products on smokers who switch.
Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) is a measure of the day-to-day functioning and well-being of a person that is used to assess the effect of illness or injury over time. HRQoL measurements are important to public policy, because ...
A new analysis has found that, among patients with cancer, rates of health insurance coverage vary by patient demographics and by cancer type. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the findings suggest that the expansion of coverage through the Affordable Care Act may disproportionally benefit certain patient populations.
In the United States, an estimated 48 million individuals live without health insurance. To examine how insurance coverage differs among cancer patients according to various individual factors such ...
British stoats suffered a dramatic loss in genetic diversity in the 20th Century but extinct British genes were preserved in the stoat population of New Zealand, a new study has found.
The research reveals that stoats, which were introduced to New Zealand, have greater genetic diversity there, than in their native Britain. The results are unusual because introducing a species to a new area is usually associated with a loss in its genetic diversity.
The study, which was carried out by researchers at the Universities of Exeter, Auckland, Griffith and Canberra and at Landcare ...
To maintain the idea that we are moral people, we tend to lie or cheat only to the extent that we can justify our transgressions. New research suggests that situational ambiguity is one such avenue for justification that helps us preserve our sparkling self-image. Findings from two related experiments show that people are apt to cheat on a task in favor of their self-interest but only when the situation is ambiguous enough to provide moral cover.
The research, conducted by psychological scientists Andrea Pittarello, Margarita Leib, Tom Gordon-Hecker, and Shaul Shalvi, ...
A common spinal disease could be the result of some people's vertebrae, the bones that make up the spine, sharing similarities in shape to a non-human primate. The research, published in the open access journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, suggests that the relatively quick evolution of the ability to walk on two legs may have had a substantial impact on modern human health.
Humans are more commonly afflicted with spinal disease than non-human primates, and one widely discussed explanation for this is the stress placed on the spine by bipedal locomotion. This research backs ...
UK scientists may have uncovered a natural way of avoiding the use of pesticides and help save plants from attack by recreating a natural insect repellent.
Scientists from Cardiff University and Rothamsted Research have, for the first time, created tiny molecules which mirror a natural occurring smell known to repel insects.
The scientists were able to make similar smelling insect repellent molecules, by providing the enzyme, ((S)-germacrene D synthase), which creates the smell, with alternative substrate molecules.
The effectiveness of the smell or perfume to ...
Referring patients with unexplained swollen neck glands for specialist investigations could help to avoid some of the thousands of deaths each year from lymphoma, a type of cancer.
New research led by the University of Exeter Medical School, published today in the British Journal of General Practice, has concluded that persistent enlarged lymph glands, found in the neck, should be referred for further investigation when detected in clinic.
Each year in the UK, more than 14,500 people in are diagnosed with a form of lymphoma, and nearly 5,000 die from the disease, with ...
Researchers from the University of Cambridge have captured the first three-dimensional images of a live embryo turning itself inside out. The images, of embryos of a green alga called Volvox, make an ideal test case to understand how a remarkably similar process works in early animal development.
Using fluorescence microscopy to observe the Volvox embryos, the researchers were able to test a mathematical model of morphogenesis - the origin and development of an organism's structure and form - and understand how the shape of cells drives the process of inversion, when ...
Barcelona, Spain: Results from a randomised controlled trial to compare the use of permanent radioactive implants (brachytherapy) with dose-escalated external beam radiotherapy in patients with prostate cancer show that the men who received brachytherapy were twice as likely to be cancer-free five years later.
Presenting these results at the 3rd ESTRO Forum in Barcelona, Spain, today (Monday) Professor James Morris, from the Department of Radiation Oncology, Vancouver Cancer Centre, British Columbia Cancer Agency (BCCA), Vancouver, Canada, will say that the ASCENDE-RT1 ...
