"Sex education seems to be working," said Trisha Mueller, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It seems to be especially effective for populations that are usually at high risk."
The first of its kind in many years, the new study is published in the January issue of the Journal of Adolescent Health.
Mueller and co- researchers found that sex education reduced by 91 percent the risk that African-American females in school would have sex before age 15.
In general, however, sex education appeared to have no effect on whether female teens used birth control, according to Mueller.
Earlier large-scale research into the effectiveness of sex education relied on data from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Those studies suggested that sex education was not very effective at delaying sex, she said.
The new study, looked at a sample of 2,019 teenagers ages 15 to 19 years, who responded to a survey during a 2002 national study.
