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Pizza is not all bad, but fewer than 1 percent of American teens have ideal diets, plus they don't exercise enough, according to new research.

A stunning 80 percent of U.S. teenagers are eating diets that put them on a clear path to heart disease, researchers reported on Monday.

They’re eating too much fat, salt and sugar and not eating enough fruits and vegetables, the American Heart Association study found. Just 1 percent ate what the Heart Association considers a perfectly healthy diet.

Plus they don’t exercise enough, says Christina Shay of the the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, who led the study.

“The far less-than-optimal physical activity levels and dietary intake of current U.S. teenagers, is translating into obesity and overweight that, in turn, is likely influencing worsening rates of high blood pressure, high cholesterol and blood glucose at these young ages,” Shay said in a statement.

It’s no secret that Americans, and especially teens, eat poor diets. What concerns the Heart Association and doctors is that people may not realize how little slack there is for teenagers to get away with this. The seeds of heart disease are sown in childhood, these experts advise.

“Autopsy findings reported more than a century ago identified fatty streaks in the large arteries of children as young as 6 years of age,” Shay’s team wrote in their report, published in the journal Circulation.

More recent studies have found evidence of early heart disease in children.

The researchers surveyed 4,600 teenagers taking part in a large national study. The teens answered detailed questions about their eating and exercise habits and also underwent medical exams. The team looked for their blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels, as well as weight and diet and exercise.

Fewer than 80 percent scored well on diet. Just 1 percent met the ideal guidelines of 4.5 or more cups a day of fruits and vegetables, two servings of fish a week, 3 ounces a day of whole grains, less than 1,500 mg of salt a day and no more than 450 calories worth of sugar-sweetened drinks a week.

Only 45 percent scored acceptably on five or more of the factors. Only 44 percent of girls and 67 percent of boys reported idea physicial activity levels. Just two-thirds had ideal weights.

A third already had unhealth cholesterol levels or were on the way there, the report found. The good news came on blood pressure – 90 percent of the girls and 78 percent of the boys had healthy blood pressure.  And 66 to 70 percent had never tried smoking.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer in the United States. The Heart Association says 80 percent of cases can be prevented with healthy habits.

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By Genevra Pittman
Reuters

About one in 25 U.S. teens has attempted suicide, according to a new national study, and one in eight has thought about it. 

Researchers said those numbers are similar to the prevalence of lifetime suicidal thinking and attempts reported by adults - suggesting the teenage years are an especially vulnerable time.

"What adults say is, the highest risk time for first starting to think about suicide is in adolescence," said Matthew Nock, a psychologist who worked on the study at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The results are based on in-person interviews of close to 6,500 teens in the U.S. and questionnaires filled out by their parents. Along with asking youth about their suicidal thinking, plans and attempts, interviewers also determined which teens fit the bill for a range of mental disorders.

Just over 12 percent of the youth had thought about suicide, and four percent each had made a suicide plan or attempted suicide.

Nock and his colleagues found that almost all teens who thought about or attempted suicide had a mental disorder, including depression, bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or problems with drug or alcohol abuse.

More than half of the youth were already in treatment when they reported suicidal behavior. Nock said that was both "encouraging" and "disturbing."

"We know that a lot of the kids who are at risk and thinking about suicide are getting (treatment)," he told Reuters Health. However, "We don't know how to stop them - we don't have any evidence-based treatments for suicidal behavior."

Who is at risk?
Amy Brausch, a psychologist who has studied adolescent self-harm and suicide at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, said the finding shouldn't be interpreted to mean mental health treatment doesn't work for teens. 

"We don't know from this study if they even told their therapist they were having these thoughts, we don't know if it was a focus of the treatment," Brausch, who wasn't involved in the new research, told Reuters Health.

The findings were published this week in JAMA Psychiatry. But they still leave many questions unanswered.

Because most youth who think about suicide never go on to make an actual plan or attempt, doctors need to get better at figuring out which ones are most at risk of putting themselves in danger, according to Nock.

Once those youth are identified, researchers will also have to determine the best way to treat them, he said - since it's clear that a lot of current methods aren't preventing suicidal behavior.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is the third leading cause of death for people between age 10 and 24, killing about 4,600 young people annually. 

Although girls are more likely to attempt suicide - a pattern confirmed by Nock's study - boys have higher rates of death by suicide because they typically choose more deadly methods, such as guns.

For parents, Brausch advised keeping open communication with their adolescent and not being afraid to ask about things like depression. They should also pay attention to changes in mood or behavior, she added.

Nock agreed. "For parents, if they suspect their child is thinking about suicide… or talking about death, I would have that child evaluated," he said. 

By Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

Teens who own a smartphone may be at increased risk for engaging in risky sex behavior, a new study suggests.

In the study, 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. Teens with smartphones were also more likely to be sexually active in general, and more likely to say they had been approached for sex online.

The results held even after the researchers accounted for factors that could affect sexual behavior and cellphone use, such as age, gender, race and sexual orientation.

The study was presented here today (Oct. 30) at the annual meeting of the America Public Health Association.

Smartphones likely aren't directly causing risky teen sex, said study researcher Eric Rice, of the University of Southern California's School of Social Work in Los Angeles. Rather, smartphones may make it easier for teens to arrange sexual encounters, Rice said. 

"It's a tool through which this sort of behavior can happen," Rice said.

While parents have come up with strategies to monitor the online behavior of their kids on computers, "I don’t know that we've thought through quite as clearly what it means for teens to have the Internet on their phones 24 hours a day," Rice said.

Rice said sex education programs should start to include discussions regarding the risks of seeking sex online. In addition, parents should use this as an opportunity to begin a discussion with their teen about sexual health and use of technology, he said.

"I don't want parents to freak out," Rice said.

The study involved about 1,840 high-school students in the Los Angeles Unified School District who were surveyed in the 2010 to 2011 school year. The majority (71 percent) identified as Hispanic or Latino.

About one-third said they had a smartphone, 5 percent said they used the Internet to seek sex partners, and 17 percent said they had been approached for sex online. For comparison, a Nielson survey released in September found about 58 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds now own a smartphone. Differences in demographic factors may have also played a role in smartphone ownership.

Forty-seven percent of teens who owned a smartphone said they were sexually active, compared with 35 percent of those who did not own a smartphone.

The researchers plan to submit their study for publication in a scientific journal.

Follow Rachael Rettner on Twitter @RachaelRettner, or MyHealthNewsDaily @MyHealth_MHND.We're also on Facebook & Google+.

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By Dr. Tyeese Gaines

American children visit the emergency room as often as 825,000 times a year -- not for broken bones or bellyaches -- but to urgently see a psychiatrist. Yet, aside from the select few who are suicidal, a threat to others or severely debilitated, most are discharged and sent home.

It turns out that a surprising number of ER patients are being seen for behavioral issues or a minor psychiatric crisis. A review of 2,900 records of ER patients ages 17 and younger showed the majority were brought to the hospital because of issues such as disruptive classroom behavior, verbal altercations and running away, according to a 2011 John Hopkins study.

Experts question whether these children need to visit the ER at all and whether they are unnecessarily taxing an already overstretched emergency care system.

“If somebody comes in with pneumonia, we give antibiotics and they’re fine,” said Dr. Muhammad Waseem, pediatric emergency physician at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in Bronx, NY. “But, with mental health, they require significant resources, time, and services.”

Several reports confirm that pediatric ER visits for psychiatric complaints have risen over the last decade and continue to increase. National data presented last fall found that visits over an eight-year period -- from 1999 to 2007 -- had increased by 20 percent.

“[Parents] don’t know what to do,” says Dr. Gary M. Blau, clinical psychologist and chief of the Child, Adolescent and Family Branch of the U.S. Center for Mental Health Services. “They’re not sure what mental health conditions are and whether to be concerned about them or not.”

Dr. Tyeese Gaines

“Often the parents themselves feel unsafe, or the home situation is unsafe, such as for a younger sibling,” says emergency medicine doctor Dr. Audrey Paul. “They are in a state of crisis.”

The ER, however, is not the best location for pediatric mental health concerns, according to child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Jacqueline Smith at University of North Carolina Hospitals.

“The emergency department can be traumatizing for a child,” she says. “Also, appropriate staff may not be readily available for assessments or recommendations, leading to very long waits for these children.”

Paul agrees. “It’s loud. It’s overcrowded. And, privacy is an issue.”

Given the limited amount of available mental health beds for admitted children, Paul -- who is a pediatric ER physician and an associate professor of emergency medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine -- shares that these children can sometimes stay in the emergency department for over 24 hours.

Similarly, nationwide, children with mental health complaints are twice as likely to wait four hours or more than those with other ER complaints, subsequently contributing to ER overcrowding and limiting care to the other children waiting to be seen.

Some studies suggest that the increase in visits do not actually correlate to an increase in psychiatric illnesses among children.

 “Unruly behavior can be the result of a psychiatric or medical illness, but it can also be the result of parents having difficulty setting limits,” Smith says. “If behavior is simply unruly, it should be addressed, but perhaps not in an emergency room.”

Tanya Haney-Miller, a school counselor in New Jersey, says that it sometimes comes down to discipline.

“A lot of parents are fearful of [child protective services], and parents don’t want anyone in their business,” she says. “They’d rather avoid disciplining their child because they think that the main way of disciplining is hitting. Some don’t know another way.”

Waseem acknowledges that parents have it rough, making it hard to give troubled children the type of attention and support needed to defuse such issues.

“Parents are living in a high-stress situation,” he says. “They don’t have adequate time. With economic issues, both parents are forced to work in order to sustain, and there is no one to adequately supervise the child.”

Children are exposed to these same high-stress environments which can lead to psychological outbursts after just a minor exposure to emotional trauma, Waseem adds.

He also points out that just because many of these children are discharged doesn’t mean the visit wasn’t warranted. At times, the complaints are issues that can be solved in the emergency department during a long ER stay.

Blau, too, says not to discount the demand for ER psychiatric care. The rates of mental health among children are significant: the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that one in five adolescents has a diagnosable mental health disorder.

All of those interviewed felt that the lack of outpatient resources was a key factor in the increase in ER mental health visits. The most at-risk and economically disadvantaged patients make up a large amount of the visits.

Delinquent behavior: Criminalized rather than diagnosed

“There are simply not enough child and adolescent mental health providers, particularly psychiatrists,” Smith says. “As more parents lose insurance coverage, so do their children. This increases the number of children requiring community mental health services, straining that system. Out of frustration, parents turn to the emergency department.”

In some cases, even the outpatient resources that do exist, such as counselors and schools, still refer patients to the ER for behavioral issues rather than solely psychiatric ones.

“If the schools had programs in place to deal with these things, many of these visits could be avoided,” Paul says. “But, a lot of after school and community based programs have been cut.”

Haney-Miller says that despite her opinion that ER psychiatric evaluations often fall short of expectations, there are protocols to follow.

“Sometimes, it’s not even a thorough evaluation,” she says. “But, we still have to send them. It’s policy.” Haney-Miller adds that with certain mental health crises, the children can’t attend school until a psychiatrist evaluates them.

“They can opt to go to their private physician,” she says. “But, if they don’t have insurance or they have Medicaid, there may be a huge wait for the clinic, and they’re not allowed to return to school.”

Several schools near Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center have mental health services embedded into their programs, according to Waseem. He says in six months, his ER only received three children from those schools.

“They are not referring their psychiatric children to the ER,” he says. “They are managing themselves.”

However, Blau cautions against broadly discouraging parents from bringing their children to the ER for evaluation.

“While there is truth to the overuse of the ER,” he says, “that one time a parent doesn’t go, there’s a tragedy.”

Dr. Tyeese Gaines is a physician-journalist with over 10 years of print and broadcast experience, now serving as health editor for theGrio.com (NBC News). Dr. Ty is also a practicing emergency medicine physician in New Jersey. Follow her on twitter at @doctorty or on Facebook.

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By MyHealthNewsDaily Staff

Teen drinking and driving rates have dropped by 54 percent over the last two decades. However, that still means that 1 million teens drank and drove in 2011, according to a new report.

Among teen drivers who were involved in fatal crashes in 2010, 1 in 5 had some alcohol in their system, and 81 percent had blood alcohol levels over the legal limit for adults, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Binge drinking, which was defined as having at least five alcoholic drinks within a few hours, was reported by 85 percent of high school teens who noted drinking and driving in the past month.

"We are moving in the right direction," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the CDC director. "But we must keep up the momentum," because 1 in 10 high school teens drinks and drives each month, endangering themselves and others.

For the report, CDC researchers analyzed data gathered during the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys between 1991 and 2011. In these national surveys, high school students were asked if they had driven a vehicle after drinking alcohol at least during the previous 30 days.

Drinking and driving rates were generally higher among males than females, and were highest among males age 18 and older. In this group, 18 percent reported drinking and driving in the past month.

Parents' efforts to get involved in their teens' lives can help keep them safe, according to the report. Parents can model safe-driving behavior and use tools such as parent-teen driving agreements.

Research has also shown that laws establishing a minimum legal drinking age, zero-tolerance laws and a graduated driver-licensing system can protect teen drivers.

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• 3 New Dangerous Drug Habits in Teens 

Rachael Rettner
MyHealthNewsDaily

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is generally safe, but may increase the risk of fainting and skin infections shortly after vaccination, a new study finds.

The study included nearly 200,000 girls who received at least one dose of the quadrivalent HPV vaccine, known as Gardasil, which is marketed by Merck & Co. and protects against four strains of HPV.

Researchers found that fainting was six times more likely to occur on the day of vaccination, compared with a period many months after vaccination — there were 24 cases of fainting per 1,000 people on the day of vaccination, compared with an average of four cases per 1,000 people during a time period months after vaccination. 

And skin infections were nearly twice as likely to occur within two weeks of vaccination compared with many months after vaccination. There were 3.5 cases of skin infections per 1,000 people during the two weeks after vaccination, compared with 2.2 cases per 1,000 people during the comparison time period, the researchers said.

Because these side effects were somewhat expected, and the study did not find any new safety concerns, the findings "support the general safety of routine vaccination," the researchers said.

HPV viruses are sexually transmitted viruses that usually cause no symptoms, but persistent infections can lead to cervical cancer. Gardasil was approved in 2006, after studies showed it was safe for use in females ages 9 to 26. But because studies conducted before a vaccine's approval are usually too small to detect rare side effects, researchers have continued to monitor the safety of the HPV vaccine.

In the new study, Nicola Klein, of Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in Oakland, Calif., and colleagues analyzed information from about 189,600 girls and young women, who received a total of 350,000 doses of the HPV vaccine between 2006 and 2008. The researchers calculated the annual rate of each side effect they observed.

The researchers determined how likely participants were to be hospitalized or visit the emergency room for certain conditions in the 60 days after the vaccination, compared with a period many months after vaccination.

Injections in general are known to be linked with fainting, and so this result "is not unexpected," the researchers said.

There is evidence to suggest some of the skin infections seen in the study were actually reactions at the injection site, but the researchers did not have enough information to confirm this.

Unlike some earlier studies, the new study did not find an increased risk of blood clots linked with the vaccine. The researchers made sure to rule out side effects that were due to conditions the patients already had.

Ongoing studies of HPV are still needed to examine the risk of side effects, the researchers said. They noted that future studies should attempt to rule out effects that could be caused by pre-existing conditions.

The study was funded by Merck, and is published Oct. 1 in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

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By Trevor Stokes, LiveScience Contributor

Adolescents are known to do stupid things, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're risk takers.

Instead, a team of economic researchers and psychologists explains that adolescents are more willing than adults to accept ambiguity and take action even when they don't fully understand the consequences, according to a study released Oct. 1.

"In risky situations where you know the outcomes and the probability of the outcome, teenagers didn't take more risks than adults," lead study researcher Agnieszka Tymula, a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, told LiveScience. "Teenagers went for the risky option more often when the outcome was not exactly known."

Teenagers' high tolerance to ambiguity is compounded by the fact that they often put themselves in situations where they might not even recognize the ambiguity of the full spectrum of consequences, Tymula said.

The acceptance of the unknown makes teenagers engage in riskier behavior, the researchers concluded.

Related: 10 Facts About the Teen Brain

Risk and ambiguity may sound like ugly stepsisters, but for economists and psychology researchers, the two are separate and distinct. In risky situations, the different consequences are known whereas in ambiguous situations, all possible consequences may not be known.

The teen lottery
In the new study, the researchers had 33 adolescents ages 12 to 17 and 32 adults ages 30 to 50 play a game in which they had to choose between a payoff of $5 or a 50/50 chance of winning either $50 or zilch. In the "ambiguous" lottery, the chance to get $50 or nothing ranged from 25 percent to 75 percent, giving wiggle room and uncertainty at the betting table.

Adolescents entered fewer risky lotteries than adults when the chances of winning were known across 160 lottery trials. However, teens took part more frequently in the ambiguous lotteries where the payout probability wasn't as well known. For example, when the chance of winning $50 was 38 percent, one teen went for it 50 percent of the time during 160 trials whereas one adult went for it about 75 percent of the time.

"The important lesson we learned here is when adolescents know the risks precisely, they will be less likely to take part in the risk," Tymula said.

The situation may be more complicated than adolescents accepting more ambiguity, but may involve a whole host of other factors such as hope and optimism for good outcomes, according to Paul Slovic, founder and president of Decision Research, a nonprofit that analyzes risk and decision-making, who was not involved in the study.

"Fuzzy gambles may lead to faster, less deliberative thinking that gives rise to optimism," Slovic wrote in an email. In this case, lotteries with precise 50/50 probabilities perhaps constricted the teen's sense of hope and "reduced the positive feelings adolescents had regarding the big payoffs."

Limitations to teen findings
One expert cautioned that the results, while intriguing, are limited.

"The conclusions are certainly interesting but should be viewed with caution," Frank Farley, a professor of educational psychology at Temple University, who was not involved in the study, wrote in an email. "No direct replication and a small unrepresentative sample tested on a narrow range of behavior means 'don't over-generalize.'"

The study also didn't control for the fact that teens and adults differ in the perceived value of the money offered, Farley said.

In the future, Tymula said that the research group hopes to figure out how attitudes toward known and unknown risks develop across a life span and to relate it back to brain functioning to see how the biology drives risk attitudes.

As for now, Tymula said their results give support to simulation programs that ensure adolescents know the risks before they take action.

For example, to reduce drunken driving, "if adolescents can feel how it is to drive drunk (in a simulation), that could help minimize bad decision-making," Tymula said.

The study appeared in today's Oct. 1 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More from LiveScience:

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• 10 Scientific Tips For Raising Happy Kids
• Inside the Brain: A Journey Through Time

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Teens who play on more than one sports team during the year are far less likely to become overweight or obese, a new study suggests.

In fact, Dartmouth College researchers concluded that the obesity rate among high schoolers could be cut by more than 26 percent if all teens signed up for multiple team sports, according to the study, published today in the journal Pediatrics.

The researchers also found that kids who bike or walk to school are less likely to become obese. If every kid in the country biked or walked to school at least four days a week, then obesity could be cut by 22 percent, they reported.

“I know that coordinating schedules can be difficult in terms of getting kids to practices and games,” said study co-author Keith Drake, a post doctoral research fellow at the Hood Center for Children and Families at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth.

“But it does look to us like getting kids involved in sports may be the best chance we have to get them physically active and to help them maintain a healthy body weight.”

Playing on a single team didn’t appear to have a strong effect. Still, Drake said: “Playing on one team is probably better than playing on none.”

Drake and his colleagues surveyed 1,718 New Hampshire and Vermont high school students and their parents for the new study. The new report is part of a seven-year review of adolescent health that started in 2002 and included five separate surveys of the kids and their parents.

In each survey, the kids were questioned about a variety of topics, including their diet, academic performance, weight, and time spend on physical activities. By the end of the study, most of the teens were in ninth or 10th grade.

Almost three-quarters of the teens reported playing on sports teams: 17 percent played on one team, 19 percent on two teams and 33 percent on three or more teams.

When the researchers accounted for factors such as weight at the beginning of the study, diet, gender and race, they found that the kids were much less likely to become overweight or obese if they played on two or more teams during the year.

Dr. William Stratbucker, a pediatric obesity specialist, isn’t surprised that kids needed to play more than one team sport to lower the risk of becoming obese. He said that teens who participate in only one sport shouldn’t consider themselves active.

“The problem is that families often assume that if they put their kid into a soccer program that that is enough,” said Stratbucker, an associate professor at Michigan State University and director of the Healthy Weight Center at the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich. “But that’s only eight weeks a year. What about the other 44 weeks a year when they’re going about their same nutrition habits. Maybe a few weeks in the sport they’ll maintain their weight, but they will gain weight during the other weeks.”

Kids need to be doing activities all year long that will raise their heart and respiration rates, he said.

Stratbucker is particularly concerned about girls who seem to be eschewing sports more and more these days.

“There seems to be a cultural expectation of girls now,” he said. “They’re being encouraged to do things that don’t cause them to breathe hard or work up a sweat.”

Getting kids to sign up for sports may not be a panacea, Stratbucker said, “but I applaud the authors of the study for worrying about this issue and getting the discussion going,” he added.

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A simple blood test may one day be all that’s needed to help parents figure out whether a child is suffering from clinical depression or normal teenage angst, a new study suggests.

In a pilot study of 28 adolescents, scientists showed that teenage depression could be diagnosed through a panel of 11 genetic markers, according to a report published in the journal Translational Psychiatry.

If the results are confirmed in larger trials, doctors may one day be able to screen for depression just as they do for diabetes, says study co-author Eva Redei, the David Lawrence Stein professor of psychiatric diseases affecting children and adolescents at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

This new research could help not only teens, but also adults suffering from depression, says Dr. Michael Thase, a professor of psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

“This is very interesting early research that could point to the development of not just biomarkers, but also help with the identification of new genes that are involved with the expression of this common illness,” he says.  “And that could potentially lead to new treatments.”

With no actual test, diagnosis of depression is currently subjective and depends on a person's ability to identify and describe symptoms. This is especially difficult for teens who may be particularly out of touch with what's going on.

Researchers developed their test by first studying rats specially bred to model human depression. While rats don’t experience all the symptoms of depression, they do show many of the same signs.

Related video: Does Facebook add to teen loneliness, depression?

“They huddle together,” says Redei. “They don’t move around a lot. They aren’t much interested in playing. They’re less interested in food than normal rats. And they don’t sleep well.”

Intriguingly, the "depressed" rats also respond well to certain antidepressants, says Redei. 

"In reality, depression affects our ancient brains as much as our new brain,” she says. “And the ancient brain is the same in humans as it is in rats.”

Severe depression is thought to be caused by a combination of environmental and complicated genetic factors, she explains, and given the right genetics, can be kicked off by “any kind of environmental challenge such as trauma or life stresses." 

To see how the depressive brain reacts to environmental triggers, Redei and her colleagues looked at differences in the way normal rats and depression-model rats behaved in response to stress. They pulled blood samples from all the rats and found a host of markers that differed between the two groups.

In the second part of their study, the researchers examined blood from 14 depressed and 14 healthy teens, looking at the levels of 26 markers that had been identified in the depression-model rats.

They found that 11 of those markers, taken together, accurately predicted which teens were clinically depressed.

Thase, of the University of Pennsylvania, says further research might be a boon to diagnosing both teen -- and adult -- depression.

"Now you would want to see if they get the same results with older people," he says. "Or does it have something to do specifically with early onset depression?"