They should be the healthiest people on the planet, the ‘almost grown ups’ still in the bloom of youth and full of dreams for the future. But today’s adolescents are instead a troubled generation, marooned in a no man’s land between childhood and adulthood, prey to forces beyond their control.

Far from being the healthiest time of life, adolescence is instead a period of maximum risk and maximum vulnerability according to scientists, as still-growing bodies and undeveloped minds hurl themselves into experimentation with drink, drugs and sex. They are targeted by the mass marketing of unhealthy products and lifestyles – tobacco, alcohol, junk food – which doctors compare to an infectious disease epidemic. And evidence shows British teenagers are among those exposed to the greatest threats.

In a series of papers on adolescent health published in The Lancet today, scientists describe how new research has changed our understanding of adolescence which was thought to start with the physical changes to the body around puberty and to be completed when growth stopped in the late teens. Now researchers believe the brain goes on maturing and is not fully developed until at least the age of 24.

While puberty catapults adolescents into a period of […]