Do high school sports fuel unhealthy behaviors?

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Think that getting high school students involved in team sports will help keep them away from drugs, alcohol and other unhealthy behaviors?

It's not entirely true, according to research presented today at the American Public Health Association's annual meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Team sports participation appears to have both "protective and risk-enhancing" associations for high school students, Dr. Susan M. Connor of the Injury Prevention Center, Rainbow Babies & Children's Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio told Reuters Health.

"There is a lot of rhetoric," she said, "that promotes sports team participation as a complete positive -- something that has no negative effects. Sports participation is kind of almost rhetorically positioned as a panacea for social ills; it will stop crime and alcohol and drug use. But all the bits and pieces of evidence suggest that's not really true."

Connor and her colleagues analyzed survey responses from a representative group of more than 13,000 US high school students who participated in the 2007 Youth Risk Behavioral Survey.

"Our hypothesis was that sports team participation would not be overwhelmingly positive but it would have positive and negative effects, which is just what we found," Connor said.

Roughly 60 percent of the boys surveyed participated in team sports in the past year. For these young men, sports team participation was associated with decreased levels of depression and smoking, but it was also associated with an increased likelihood of fighting, drinking and binge drinking.

Of the high school girls surveyed, 48 percent reported being on one or more sports team in the past year. For girls, the findings differed somewhat by race. For white young women, sports team participation was associated with decreased levels of fighting, depression, cigarette smoking, marijuana use, and unhealthy weight loss practices, Connor and colleagues found.

There was no association between sports team participation and drinking for white female students. However, for black high school girls, sports team participation was associated with increased levels of binge drinking.