The Age of “Adolescence”

This issue contains a Position Statement defining the purview of the specialist in Adolescent Medicine as persons ages 10 to 25 years of age. (1) This age range, broader than the traditional 12 to 18 or 12 to 21, acknowledges that the discipline of Adolescent Medicine is applicable to the preteen in earliest stages of puberty or adolescence and to the undergraduate and graduate student emerging from late adolescence to young adulthood. While it seems easy to define the age range appropriate for the field of Adolescent Medicine, it appears much more challenging to define an age range for In the March 1994 issue of Pediatrics, Drs. Ted Grace and Kevin Patrick, student health physicians, discussed the dilemma of a lack of consensus on a chronological definition of (2) Dr Grace challenged the Society for Adolescent Medicine to take the lead in establishing precise age categories for the stages of adolescence. I certainly appreciate the dilemma. When preparing a set of tables of normative physical and physiological data for a Ross Labs monograph and then for the McAnarney et al textbook, I encountered many variations of age-groupings for data concerning adolescents. (3) There have been many times when I have wished that everyone could get together and accept a common definition for adolescent and a common approach to age groupings for all of our endeavors in clinical practice, data collection, and research. However, I have reflected on this a great deal and would like to offer a different perspective. I believe it is impractical, if not impossible, to achieve consensus. As a specialist in Adolescent Medicine, I