[Defense and illustration of a health examination in adolescents as observed in the course of secondary education].

In France, children's health is carefully looked after by periodical examinations from birth to six years old. But the french children cannot have afterwards a systematic health examination during the course of their compulsory attendance at school, except those preparing a technical teaching. The author suggests that an examination during the first period of adolescence (between 11 and 15 years old) should be a vector of information very useful to subjects themselves and knowledge in Public Health not much documented at this stage. To assert this statement and draw useful conclusions, the Institut Regional pour la Santé de Tours, whose the author is the founder, and the departmental School Health Service have co-ordinated their actions for an examination on 56 classes in second forms (randomised among 321) of 1316 schoolchildren (662 boys-654 girls). This clinical, paraclinical and biological survey pointed out bad habits of nutrition, alcoholic drinks, smoking, excess of corpulence and blood pressure, visual and auditive trouble unknown or neglected, dental caries not treated, statics trouble and high hypercholesterolemia, as well. All these pathological elements are unknown and not taken over on the whole, at the present time. But these discoveries cannot really justify the systematic generalisation of an health examination, if, on the one hand, there is not an efficient follow-up that affects family physicians, pediatricians, local Health Educational Services, and, on the other hand, a short and mean-dated estimation. Such a completed and systematic examination could then be essential both from the individual benefit point of view and to the literature in Public Health (analytical and descriptive epidemiology). The author also refers to a similar study, as productive as the former, led one year before in the first form. Whatever the form--first or second ones--systematization of a good examination must fill the blank: it can be validly made by the coordinated actions of a dynamic School Health Service, a local partnership (bringing logistic, laboratory, data processing and physicians (general practitioners or pediatricians) for a medical and educational follow-up essential not only in the immediate future but with a view to a mean and long-dated prevention.