The age of adolescence…and young adulthood

On behalf of the European Training Effective Care and Health Faculty, I would like to acknowledge the increasing body of evidence of adolescent and young adult development concisely summarised by Susan M Sawyer and colleagues in their Viewpoint published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.1 However, we do not see the added value of defining the developmental period from 10 to 24 years as adolescence, as Sawyer and colleagues propose. In our opinion, this redefinition will only perpetuate the confusion in terminology that exists already.