In recent decades global attention has focused on the health of children younger than 5 years.  The health of adolescents has attracted relatively little attention.  In this context, the paper below paper examined a question of the relative gains in health that younger children have seen compared to adolescents over the last half century.  Working with colleagues in London and with WHO Geneva, we tracked rates and causes of death in fifty countries in children and young people aged 1–24 years. There were great declines in death rates in younger children but comparatively small declines in those for older adolescents and young adults.  The results suggest there has been a reversal of traditional mortality patterns across childhood and adolescents with the highest death rates now in the late teens and early twenties.

For more information read the Lancet_article (PDF).