A University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine study links overweight and underweight girls with increased likelihood for engaging in sexual risk-taking behavior.

The study, conducted by Aletha Akers, an assistant professor of gynecology and reproductive sciences at the school of medicine, found that girls who were both sexually active and overweight, or who thought they were overweight, were less likely to use condoms than normal-weight sexually active girls. Underweight girls also were less likely to use condoms.

The results also suggest that a girl's ethnicity and her actual weight or perception of her weight may play a role in her participation in risky sexual behaviors.

Study results, published in the online November issue of Pediatrics, also produced these findings:

Caucasian girls who believed that they were underweight, whether accurate or not, were more likely to have had sex and to have had four or more sexual partners. Overweight Caucasian girls were less likely to use condoms.

Underweight African-American girls also were less likely to use condoms while overweight African-American girls reported four or more sexual partners.

Latina girls of all weights were more likely to engage in a wide variety of sexual risk behaviors, including lack of condom or oral contraception use, sex before age 13, greater than four sexual partners and use of alcohol.

Of 7,200 high school girls who were asked about their sexual activity and risky sexual behavior as part of the 2005 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey, half of them reported ever having sex.

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