WEDNESDAY, Dec. 5 (HealthDay News) -- For the first time in 14 years, the number of teenagers having babies in the United States rose last year, according to a new government report released Wednesday.

That startling news was accompanied by additional data showing that last year also had record high rates for unmarried women having babies as well as for Caesarean deliveries.

The findings are in preliminary birth statistics compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and were based on 99 percent of all births in 2006.

"The finding on teen pregnancy was a surprise," said Stephanie Ventura, head of the CDC's Reproductive Statistics Branch. "Even though the rate of decline had slowed down, we didn't expect an increase."

She added, "It's too soon to say if the increased birth rate among teens is a trend. It could be just a one-year blip, or the start of a turning point."

While the exact cause for the teen birth rate rise remains unclear, Ventura thinks that the increase may be partly a result of not reaching hard-to-reach teens, "teens that need more encouragement," she said.

In addition, Ventura said she thought that there may be more risk-taking among teens or changes in attitudes.

And she noted, "This will be a jolt to groups involved in teen pregnancy prevention."

"Any increase in teen pregnancy and teen births is significant and a cause for real concern," said Bill Albert, the deputy director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. "I wouldn't call it a trend, but it's an alarming wakeup call," he added.

Albert also thinks the increase in teen pregnancy is partly due to waning attention to the problem. "When you have a difficult social problem like teen pregnancy, it requires constant attention," he said. "The focus on teen pregnancy and teen births has lessened, because the news has been so consistently good since 1991."

Between 2005 and 2006, the birth rate for girls 15 to 19 rose 3 percent, from 40.5 births per 1,000 in 2005 to 41.9 births per 1,000 in 2006. This comes after 14 years of declining rates. During that time, teen births dropped 34 percent from a peak of 61.8 births per 1,000 in 1991, according to the report.

The biggest increases for 2006 were among black teens, where the rate rose 5 percent, followed by 4 percent for American-Indian teens, 3 percent for white teens and 2 percent for Hispanic teens.

However, the birth rate continued to drop for girls 10 to 14 years old. The birth rate in this group dropped from 0.7 to 0.6 per 1,000, and the number of births fell 5 percent to 6,405, the CDC reported.

For girls 18 to 19 years old, the rate of births is more than three times higher, at 73 births per 1,000, than the rate for teens 15 to 17, at 22 per 1,000. Among teens in the latter group, the birth rate rose 3 percent between 2005 and 2006. For teens 18 and 19, the birth rate rose 4 percent during the same year.

In addition, births among unmarried women were at a record high in 2006. Births to unmarried mothers increased almost 8 percent to 1,641,700 in 2006. This was a 20 percent increase from 2002, when the trend of increased births among unmarried women started. The largest increase, 10 percent, was among women 25 to 29, according to the report.

Overall, the birth rate among unmarried women rose from 47.5 births per 1,000 in 2005 to 50.6 per 1,000 in 2006. That's a 7 percent increase in one year and a 16 percent increase since 2002, the report said.

Moreover, births to unmarried mothers increased to 38.5 percent, from 36.9 percent in 2005.

Other findings in the annual report include:

• Caesarean deliveries rose 3 percent in 2006, to a new high of 31.1 percent of all births. In the last 10 years, the number of Cesarean deliveries has increased 50 percent.
• Total births in the U.S. rose 3 percent in 2006 to 4,265,996, a 3 percent increase from 2005.
• Birth rates also increased among women in their 20s, 30s and early 40ss.
• Preterm birth rates rose from 12.7 percent to 12.8 percent between 2005 and 2006. Babies delivered before 37 weeks have risen 21 percent since 1990.
• The percent of low birthweight infants rose from 8.2 in 2005 to 8.3 in 2006. The rate has increased 19 percent since 1990.
• The increased birth rate has increased the total fertility rate, which is an estimate of the average number of births that a group of women have over their lifetime. This rate increased 2 percent in 2006, to 2,101 births per 1,000 women. The rate is the highest since 1971, the first time since that year that the fertility rate was above "replacement" -- the level at which a given generation can replace itself.

More information

For more information on teen births, visit the CDC.

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 5 (HealthDay News) -- An investigational drug may be the first safe, reliable means of easing a disorder that leads to unsightly "humps" of body fat and boosts the heart risks of HIV patients.

People taking the drug tesamorelin for 26 weeks showed a 15 percent decline in dangerous visceral fat accumulating around their organs, as well as an improvement in related heart risk factors. They also reported psychological gains in terms of body image, said researchers reporting in the Dec. 6 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

While the long-term safety of tesamorelin remains unanswered, "we are very hopeful about this -- this could be one of the first major therapies in this regard," said the study's senior author, Dr. Steven Grinspoon, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

The study was funded by Theratechnologies, the Canadian company that is developing the drug.

Abnormalities in metabolism and fat deposits ("lipodystrophy") are common in people who take powerful antiretroviral drugs to help suppress HIV. "It's fairly prevalent in over half of the patients," said Grinspoon, who is also director of the Program in Nutritional Metabolism at Massachusetts General Hospital.

For reasons that remain unclear, HIV drug therapy often reduces normal fat levels in the arms and the legs while boosting it in other areas, including unsightly "humps" at the shoulder. The drugs can also shift fat deposition to deep in the abdomen, around the organs. This visceral fat is strongly associated with an increase in blood levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, as well as insulin resistance, which can lead to diabetes.

"All of that conspires to increase the risk of vascular disease," explained Dr. Marc Blackman, associate chief of staff for research and development at the VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

So far, no intervention has really helped correct this disorder, said Blackman, who also authored an accompanying commentary in the journal.

"Exercise, diet, diabetes or cholesterol drugs -- none of them has been shown to be terribly effective," he said.

Because fat deposition is linked to the release of growth hormone from the pituitary gland, researchers have tried to give patients human growth hormone. Unfortunately, the side effects from the therapy were just too onerous for most patients to bear, Grinspoon said.

Enter tesamorelin, a synthetic version of a hormone that stimulates the patient's pituitary to produce its own natural growth hormone.

In the phase III trial, Grinspoon's group had 412 HIV patients (86 percent men) with lipodystrophy receive a daily injection of 2 milligrams of tesamorelin or a placebo for 26 weeks. They then used CT scans to track changes in visceral fat over six months, and measured patients' cholesterol and triglyceride levels.

"We had a very significant reduction in visceral fat on the order of 15 percent within the group, and all of the lipid [blood fat] parameters improved -- triglycerides, cholesterol, LDL cholesterol alone," Grinspoon said. All of this occurred without unhealthy alterations in blood sugar (something seen with growth hormone therapy). Patients also reported "improvement in body image, they felt less distressed," Grinspoon said.

Side effects noted in the growth hormone studies, such as swelling and joint pain, were not seen in this trial, he added. "We basically achieved a generally similar reduction in visceral adiposity -- something very close -- without the side effects," Grinspoon said.

The study has since been extended, he added, "suggesting that [tesamorelin] is relatively safe for 12 months at least."

Still, questions about long-term safety remain. Blackman noted that about half of patients taking tesamorelin developed antibodies to the drug, suggesting an immune reaction, and a few developed a kind of skin rash.

He also wondered if chronic stimulation of the pituitary gland might cause it to enlarge or even become malignant over time -- always a danger in HIV patients, whose immune deficiencies leave them more prone to cancer.

Finally, Blackman noted that a reduction in certain heart risk factors, such as cholesterol or triglyceride levels, isn't the same thing as saying that tesamorelin cut patients' risk of cardiovascular events or death. "It is, in my opinion, the most effective [agent] to date in decreasing abdominal fat, but I think that is all that we can say," he said.

Grinspoon agreed that larger, longer-term study is needed, and he noted that a second phase III trial is already set to begin. "If that one confirms the results of this one, then I am sure [Theratechnologies] will seek approval" from the FDA, he said.

More information

There's more on lipodystrophy at the Foundation for AIDS Research  .

FRIDAY, Nov. 23 (HealthDay News) -- Children of women exposed to arsenic-contaminated water during pregnancy have gene expression changes that may result in cancer and other diseases later in life, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study suggests.

The researchers, who said their work is the first documentation of widespread genetic changes caused by prenatal exposure to an environmental contaminant, analyzed umbilical cord blood from the children of 32 mothers in an area of Thailand with heavy mining-related arsenic contamination. Similar levels of arsenic are found in many other parts of the world, including the U.S. Southwest.

Children who were exposed to arsenic in the womb had about 450 genes that were either significantly more active (in most cases) or less active than the same genes in unexposed children.

Most of the gene expression changes detected in the exposed children are associated with inflammation, which can lead to increased cancer risk. It's not clear how long these gene expression changes may last, and the researchers plan to continue testing the children.

The researchers also found that a subset of 11 of these genes could be used as a highly reliable test for determining whether a child had been exposed to arsenic while in the womb.

The study was published in the Nov. 23 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics.

More information

The U.S. Agency for Toxic Substance and Disease Registry has more about arsenic.

(HealthDay News) -- Vasectomy is a surgical procedure in which a man is sterilized. While it is a relatively simple procedure, men considering it should make sure that the option is right for them.

According to Planned Parenthood, vasectomy may not be the best birth control option if you:

• Think you may want to have biological children at some point in the future.
• Are being pressured into having the procedure by a partner, friend or family member.
• Are currently having marital, emotional, sexual, financial or mental health problems.
• You and your partner have not fully discussed or agreed on the procedure.
• Are relying on frozen sperm in case you decide to have children. Frozen sperm do not always retain the ability to fertilize a woman's egg.