Health, Teens | featured news

The proportion of American adolescents who exercise regularly, eat a healthy diet and are free of risk factors for future heart disease is "alarmingly low," says a major new survey of teen health.

More than half of all teens and young adults infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, are unaware that they're infected.

Pediatricians treating teenaged girls should consider writing just-in-case prescriptions for the morning-after pill, the the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) said on Monday. It’s the second recommendation in a week from a major doctor’s group that would make contraception more widely available to women. Last week, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommended making all birth control pills available over the counter.

All those glossy magazine ads showing men and women with bulging muscles may be having a big impact on America’s youth. Most teens report they're exercising to become more buff, and a small number of boys and girls are turning to steroids to achieve that toned look.

Two Texas sisters, ages 12 and 10, run in some of the most grueling races in the nation, but doctors say they are not in danger despite how young they are... The national championship trail run was held on a course both grueling and beautiful, more than 13 miles through the mountains near the Great Salt Lake. Most of it was an unrelenting up-and-down, the path often hugging ridges along a steep plunge, curling through a forest of scrub oak, white pine and red maple. The elevation hit a lung-busting 7,300 feet.

Free birth control led to dramatically lower rates of abortions and teen births, a large study concluded Thursday, offering strong evidence for how a bitterly contested Obama administration policy could benefit women’s health.

Kids with higher levels of the widely used substance BPA in their bodies are more likely to be obese, according to the first large-scale, nationally representative study to link an environmental chemical with obesity in children and teens.

The researchers didn't find the same IQ dip for people who became frequent users of pot after 18. Although experts said the new findings are not definitive, they do fit in with earlier signs that the drug is especially harmful to the developing brain.

HPV is a sexually transmitted disease that is most commonly passed between people during vaginal or anal intercourse. But it can also be transmitted through genital-to-genital, or hand-to-genital contact, which is how the participants in the study likely got the virus, the researchers said. Out of the more than 40 sexually transmitted HPV strains, more than a dozen have been identified as cancer-causing, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Girls are hitting puberty earlier than ever, a change that puts them at higher risk for behavior problems now, cancer problems later, a study ...