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Teens: oral sex leads to risky sex

Most teens who engage in oral sex for the first time will have vaginal intercourse within six months, a new poll indicates.

And half the teens who initiate oral sex in ninth grade will have vaginal intercourse, the survey of high school students in the US has found.

"Oral sex among adolescents happens," said study lead author Anna V. Song, an assistant professor in the school of social sciences, humanities, and arts at the University of California, Merced. "But there's two contradictory ways it can go from there: There's the possibility that for adolescents oral sex is a gateway to vaginal sex, or instead that it's being used to stave off vaginal sex."

What the researchers found

What the researchers actually found was less clear-cut. "Most of the kids report that they're having oral sex and intercourse for the very first time within the same six months," Song said.

"Among those who initiate oral sex between Grade 9 and 10, we found that oral sex is significantly related to vaginal sex," she noted.

"But once you get through that particular period, that relationship is not there anymore. And that's also true among kids who initiate oral sex before Grade 9. They are also no more or less likely to engage in vaginal sex."

So, while kids may think of oral sex as "low risk" with respect to sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy, its initiation may have a strong predictive tie to future high-risk activities. This finding should guide sex-education and preventive health programmes directed toward teens, the authors said.

The study, partially funded by the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, is published in the Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine.

The study

Between 2002 and 2005, Song and a colleague, Bonnie L. Halpern-Felsher, a professor in the division of adolescent medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, surveyed students attending two northern California public high schools.

Almost 630 participants completed an initial sexual behaviour questionnaire at the start of ninth grade, when they were 14 years old. Nearly 75% continued to respond to subsequent surveys every sixth months thereafter, up until the end of Grade 11.

Of the initial survey group, about one-fifth had initiated oral sex and 71 students had had vaginal intercourse before the start of Grade 9.

But for all ages, oral sex was twice as likely to precede the initiation of intercourse rather than the other way around.

The findings

Teens who had engaged in oral sex by the end of ninth grade were at the highest risk of engaging in vaginal intercourse during high school, with a quarter going on to have intercourse by the end of Grade 9 and half doing so by the end Grade 11. Only about 9% of those teens abstained from vaginal intercourse through Grade 11. Most paired the two activities within the same six-month period.

By contrast, teens who delayed having oral sex until the end of Grade 11 had a 57% change of avoiding vaginal intercourse through Grade 11. This could mean that teens who delay oral sex are more likely to delay vaginal sex as well, the authors said.

However, the authors said neither ethnicity, gender nor socio-economic background affected the results. The authors said teens need to be better educated about the implications of oral sex.

"First, we simply need to talk to teens about sex more," Halpern-Felsher said. "And second, when we talk to teens we need to be more explicit. Because if you talk to an adolescent only about 'sex,' what that means to them is just vaginal sex. But clearly there's a whole progression of sexual behaviours at work even if teens think that oral sex is a way to have some sort of sex without having actual sex."

"We can't be embarrassed about it," Halpern-Felsher said. "It's just too important."


(Copyright © 2010 HealthDay. All rights reserved.)

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