Technology aids teen-sex survey

Excerpts from the Globe's blog on the Boston-area medical community.

Young people feel better after sex.

Not earth-shattering news, you say?

Dr. Lydia A. Shrier, a Children's Hospital Boston researcher and lead author of a study that reached that conclusion, understands why you'd react that way, but hear her out. She says that until we know what adolescents really think about sex, anyone trying to help them have safer sex -- or no sex -- might be wasting their time.

To assess young people's emotions, Shrier's team gave hand-held computers to 67 adolescents and young adults, 15 to 21 years old, and randomly beeped them at least every three waking hours for a week. A message would then pop up on the participants' PDAs asking them how they were feeling and whether they had had sex since the previous page.

That's different from asking people specifically what they think about sex or to remember later what they felt like at the time, Shrier emphasized. This nearly real-time report of how they felt makes the study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, different from previous work, including her own, she said.

Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, says better infection control practices likely saved one life at his hospital in January, and on his blog Friday he challenged other hospitals and health insurers to share their infection numbers.

Levy posted his hospital's monthly rate of central line infections going back to October 2005. A central line is the opening through which a tube delivers medications into a patient's bloodstream. An infection can travel this route quickly, causing organ failure.

ELIZABETH COONEY