Across the United States, teen drinking rates are down but the amount of teens driving and texting have increased, according to the results of a new government study of U.S. high-school students.
The report notes that only 15.7 percent of teens were current smokers in 2013, down from 27.5 percent when the survey began and 36.4 percent in the peak year of 1997, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.
"I think the bottom line is that our teens are choosing health," CDC director Tom Frieden said.
However, parents are now facing a different concern when it comes to letting their teens drive. A very troubling new statistic shows that more than 40 percent of teenagers who drive cars admit to having texted or emailed while driving recently.
Other car-related behavior isn't so good. The survey of more than 13,000 students taken at schools across the country showed that nearly 22 percent admit to having ridden one or more times in a car or other vehicle driven by someone who had been drinking in the past month.
Meanwhile, the 2013 results show "encouraging" reductions in physical fighting among adolescents, the CDC says. The percentage of high school students who had been in a physical fight at least once in the prior year fell from 42 percent in 1991 to 25 percent in 2013.
More than 13,000 US high school students participated in the 2013 National YRBS. This survey is "an important tool for understanding how health risk behaviors among youth vary across the nation and over time," Laura Kann, PhD, chief of the CDC's School-Based Surveillance Branch, said in a statement.
