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) -- Overweight children and adolescents are more likely to be overweight or obese adults and more likely to suffer early heart disease and death, two new studies conclude.

The first, out of Denmark, found that large children, especially boys, are at an increased risk of coronary heart disease as adults.

The second, based on a computer model, found that overweight adolescents are more likely to end up with heart disease and even dying in early adulthood.

"Teenage and childhood weight does matter," said Dr. Thomas R. Kimball, a pediatric cardiologist with Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. "This is not a problem of middle-aged adults. This is a problem that we have to face as a society in our children."

"When you see a shift at this level across the entire population, it really suggests that this is a major public health problem and requires intervention that really needs to be reinforced at every level of policy makers, every level of institutions," said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, lead author of the computer modeling study.

"This is more than just a problem of overweight adolescents and their parents. It's a problem that requires really a concerted effort at federal, state, local policy levels to reinforce the availability of healthy foods for kids and the availability of physical activity. We really want to prevent obesity before it starts," said Bibbins-Domingo, who is assistant professor of medicine, epidemiology and biostatistics and the Robert Wood Johnson Harold Amos Medical Faculty Scholar at the University of California, San Francisco.

Both studies are published in the Dec. 6 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The overweight and obesity crisis is reaching epidemic proportions around the world. In the United States, federal statistics estimate that 9 million adolescents (17 percent of the population) are overweight and 80 percent of overweight adolescents grow up to be obese adults. Childhood obesity rates have tripled since 1970.

Worldwide, children are becoming heavier at younger and younger ages. In the United States, 19 percent of kids between the ages of 6 and 11 are overweight.

Being overweight or obese puts you at risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other ills.

The first study looked at a group of almost 277,000 Danish children -- all schoolchildren in Copenhagen -- from 1930 to 1976.

Out of that initial group, more than 10,200 men and 4,300 women were identified whose childhood body-mass index (BMI) data were available and who had received a diagnosis of coronary heart disease (CHD) or died of CHD as adults.

Boys with a higher BMI at 7 to 13 years of age and girls with a higher BMI from 10 to 13 years of age had a higher risk of a heart disease event in adulthood, the researchers found.

The authors used as an example a 13-year-old boy who weighs 11.2 kilograms (24.6 pounds) more than average boy his age. He now has a 33 percent increase in the probability of having a coronary event before he turns 60, the Danish team said.

"It's scary," Kimball said. "We knew that if you're an overweight kid, you're at a higher risk to be an overweight adult. This study goes a step further. It's proving that you have an increased risk of cardiovascular events as early as 25 years of age."

The second study projected the number of overweight adults based on the number of overweight adolescents in 2000.

Using a computer model, it predicted that up to 37 percent of men and 44 percent of women will be obese when these people -- now teenagers -- turn 35 in 2020.

This could result in up to 5,000 additional deaths from heart disease and 45,000 heart attacks, cardiac arrests and related events by 2035 among this group of young adults. It would raise the death toll from obesity-related coronary heart disease by 19 percent.

"To some extent, we're not surprised. We know it's not good to be overweight at any age but we were really struck by the magnitude of this increase," said Bibbins-Domingo. "We're modeling a young adult population 35 to 50 years. These are people who should be working and raising families, not worrying about heart disease, and we're suggesting more will be hospitalized for heart attacks, will need chronic medication to manage high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and many more will actually die before the age of 50."

More information

To learn more about the government's We Can! Program regarding childhood obesity, visit the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

TUESDAY, Dec. 4 (HealthDay News) -- With many children's cough syrups being pulled from the market because they don't work, an old folk remedy -- honey -- may work just as well or better, researchers report.

In a study of kids having trouble sleeping because of cough, a research team at Penn State College of Medicine compared the effectiveness of a little bit of buckwheat honey before bedtime versus either no treatment or dextromethorphan (DM), the cough suppressant found in many over-the-counter cold medicines.

"Honey provided the greatest relief of symptoms compared with the other treatments," concluded lead researcher Dr. Ian Paul, Penn State's director of pediatric clinical research.

An FDA advisory board recently recommended that over-the-counter cough and cold medicines not be given to children under 6 years of age because of a lack of effectiveness and potential for side effects.

"With honey, parents now have a safe and effective alternative to use for children over age 1 who have cough and cold symptoms," Paul said.

Paul cautioned that honey should never be given to children younger than 1, because of the rare risk of infantile botulism. In addition, he noted, cough medicines that mention "honey" on the label actually contain artificial honey flavor.

In the study, 105 children ages 2 to 18 were given either honey, artificial honey-flavored DM or no treatment about a half-hour before bedtime, according to the report in the December issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

Paul's group found that honey was more effective in reducing the severity and frequency of nighttime cough compared with DM or no treatment. Honey also allowed the children to sleep.

Moreover, DM was not much better at reducing cough than no treatment, the researchers found.

Paul's team used a dark honey in their trial. Whether other honeys would be equally effective is not known, Paul said.

Some of the children were hyperactive for a short time after being given the honey, Paul said. However, children who received honey slept better and so did their parents, the researcher noted.

Honey has been used for centuries to treat upper respiratory infection symptoms such as cough. In addition, honey has antioxidant and antimicrobial effects, and also soothes the back of the throat, Paul noted. "The World Health Organization has cited honey as a potential therapy," he said.

Charlotte Jordan, a project manager of research at the National Honey Board, believes the finding confirms what your grandmother told you.

"This is a really exciting finding," she said. "For a long time it's been folklore medicine to use honey when you have a cough or a cold, but it's exciting to have a scientific study to back that up."

More information

For more information on children's cough, visit the Nemours Foundation  .

MONDAY, Dec. 3 (HealthDay News) -- Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) may show improvements in behavior when they have a fever, a small study suggests.

This is the first study to investigate a relationship between fever and behavior change in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), the researchers said.

"I think this study means there is hope, because it means that the basic networks in the brain in autism appear to be intact," said senior investigator Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, a pediatric neurologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore.

According to the authors, ASD includes autism, autistic disorder, pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and Asperger's syndrome.

The new study adds to a growing body of research that suggests that the problems children with ASD have with behavior, language skills and social skills result from poor connections between synapses in the brain. The question, Zimmerman said, is which synapses are involved and how to stimulate them to function.

Zimmerman said the heat of a fever might stimulate changes at the cellular level. Fever's impact on the hormonal and immune systems might also be responsible for the perceived changes in the children. The changes observed in the study were not permanent, however, and disappeared within a week of the fever's end, the researchers noted.

Zimmerman also noted that the effect seems limited to viral fevers, such as flu-related fever, rather than other illnesses.

"This is a very interesting study," said Dr. Annette Estes, associate director of the University of Washington Autism Center, who interpreted the study's results in the context of a new line of research that is linking autism to immune system response and inflammation.

"This is a novel use of a child who is ill with fever," she said. "I'd like to see someone replicate this observation and make sure that this study with a small number of children holds up."

"This is the first step in a really long series of studies that needs to be done," Estes added.

In their work, Zimmerman's team compared data from 30 children with ASD who had a feverish episode, with 30 similar children with ASD who did not have a fever. Once a child had a fever, the parents were asked to observe their child for 24 hours and then complete a questionnaire about behavior and language ability. They completed a second questionnaire 48 hours after the fever and a third questionnaire after seven days without fever. Parents of the non-feverish children filled out the same questionnaire at the same times about their own child's behavior and language ability.

The study results, published in the December issue of Pediatrics, showed fewer autistic-like behaviors for children with fever, compared to the children without fever, with more than 80 percent of the fever participants showing some behavioral improvement.

Estes, who uses the same behavior checklist in her research that the researchers used in the study, cautioned that the checklist is not specific to children with ASD, nor is it used to diagnose ASD. It is used to assess behavior in children with a variety of developmental disorders, including mental retardation, genetic diseases and Down syndrome, she said.

"The checklist is used to understand other behaviors that children with autism have troubles with," Estes explained. Irritability and lethargy are among those problem areas, she said.

The fatigue associated with illness may seem a natural explanation for the changes in behavior, but the study authors found lethargy was not a factor.

"We stratified subjects based on their level of lethargy and we did not find a difference. Children in both groups, whether their lethargy was high or low, had benefits," said study lead author Laura Curran, research assistant at the institute.

The study may provide hope for future avenues of ASD research. But it also provides an important piece of information for professionals who must evaluate children with the disorder, the researchers said.

"This research adds to the literature of understanding the underlying neurological and behavioral aspects of ASD in that it assists with setting a context for evaluation and treatment. It will be important for diagnosticians to query parents and guardians as to how recently the child had a fever because it may diminish behaviors that need to be assessed," said Michael Morrier, assistant director for research and program evaluation at the Emory Autism Center in Atlanta.

Morrier said he would like to see more in-depth study of the effect.

Autism may strike one in every 150 American children, according to statistics released earlier this year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Males are four times more likely than females to be diagnosed with the disorder.

More information

To learn more about autism, visit the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.