Teens, Study | 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.

A new study finds that teens who had access to the Internet on their cellphones were more than twice as likely to engage in sex with a person they met online compared with those without access to the Internet on their phones.

Shots that protect against cervical cancer do not make girls promiscuous, according to the first study to compare medical records for vaccinated and unvaccinated girls.

Only recently have researchers begun to understand how the teen brain is wired and that some of what appear to be teens' senseless choices may result from biological tendencies that also prime their brains to learn and be flexible.

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.

Teens who send sexually explicit texts or photos are much more likely than those who don't to be sexually active, finds a survey of Los Angeles high school students.

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.

A new report on teen sex contradicts a popular notion that teens are turning to oral sex as a way to delay “real” intercourse.

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.