Adolescent Sexual Health Interventions: Innovation, Efficacy, Cost, and the Urgent Need to Scale

African American and Latinx adolescents in the United States are at high risk for experiencing poor sexual health outcomes. Compared with their white peers, African American and Latina girls are nearly twice as likely to give birth before age 20.¹ Rates of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections are also higher for racial and/or ethnic minority adolescents.² The persistence of these sexual health disparities, despite decades of intervention efforts, necessitates prevention approaches that are innovative, efficacious, cost-effective, and scalable.

In this issue of Pediatrics, Guilamo-Ramos et al³ provide rigorous evidence for a highly promising intervention, a triadic version of Families Talking Together (FTT). The triadic FTT intervention is innovative in that it involves African American and Latinx youth in early adolescence, their female caregivers, and their health care providers (HCPs). Of more than two dozen sexual health interventions for African American and/or Latinx adolescents that have been evaluated in randomized clinical trials,^4,5 FTT is the first of which we are aware that incorporates adolescents, parents, and HCPs in a single program. Incorporating both parents and HCPs into intervention efforts is wise for several reasons: HCPs can lend additional credibility to intervention …

Address correspondence to Laura Widman, PhD, Department of Psychology, North Carolina State University, 640 Poe Hall, Raleigh, NC 27695. E-mail: lmwidman{at}ncsu.edu