Researchers found that adults who drank heavily in their teenage years and young adulthood were more likely to have metabolic syndrome—a grouping of risk factors for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, including abdominal obesity, high blood pressure, low levels of “good” HDL cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high triglycerides, a type of blood fat.

Five key factors can help predict whether at-risk youth will develop schizophrenia, researchers have found: A genetic risk for schizophrenia combined with recent decline in function; higher levels of unusual thought content; more suspicion/paranoia; more social impairment; and past or current substance abuse.

Where a teenage girl sees herself on her school’s social ladder may sway her future weight, a study of more than 4,000 girls finds. Those who believed they were unpopular gained more weight over a two-year period than girls who viewed themselves as more popular. Researchers said the study showed how a girl’s view of her social status has broader health consequences. 

New research suggests that previous theories about why some poor children are obese (e.g., eating junk food instead of nutritious food or not eating when cash is short, prompting a yo-yo metabolic cycle) aren’t necessarily sound. 

Childhood allergies to milk and eggs appear to be harder to outgrow than in the past, U.S. researchers said recently. While they were often outgrown by age three 20 years ago, such allergies now often persist into late childhood, researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center report in two studies in the Journal of Clinical Immunology. “The bad news is that the prognosis for a child with a milk or egg allergy appears to be worse than it was 20 years ago,” one doctor said. “Not only do more kids have allergies, but fewer of them outgrow their allergies, and those who do, do so later than before.” 

The rates of the three leading sexually transmitted diseases rose again in the United States last year, worried public health officials said. About 19 million new infections occur each year, with almost half among people aged 15 to 24. “This is a hidden epidemic,” said one official for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Most people are not aware of how many STDs are out there, the risks that they run, and the need for getting regular testing for some of these and treatment—and having their partners treated.”

The cancer death rate for children in the United States has declined sharply—down 20 percent from 1990 to 2004—thanks to better treatment of leukemia and other cancers, health officials said recently. Yet cancer still stands as the leading disease-related cause of death for U.S. children, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report.

Childbearing among unmarried women surged to its highest level on record, health officials said. Across-the-board increases in birth rates for women ages 15 to 44 drove the total U.S. fertility rate—the estimated average number of births for women in their lifetimes—in 2006 to its highest mark since 1971, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report. Births to unmarried girls and women reached their highest levels in 2006 since the government began tracking such statistics in 1940.

“At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence or reduces the number of sexual partners’ among teenagers,” according to a study released by the nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

While some parents are fine letting adolescents drink at home under their supervision, researchers say parents should think twice about such a plan. “The data is quite clear about teen drinking, and it has nothing to do with being puritanical,” says the director of the Stanford University Center on Adolescence.