MONDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Teens who take virginity pledges are just as likely to have sex as teens who don't make such promises -- and they're less likely to practice safe sex to prevent disease or pregnancy, a new study finds.

"Previous studies found that pledgers were more likely to delay having sex than non-pledgers," said study author Janet E. Rosenbaum, a post doctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "I used the same data as previous studies but a different statistical method."

This method allowed Rosenbaum to compare those who had taken a virginity pledge with similar teens who hadn't taken a pledge but were likely to delay having sex, she said. She added that she didn't include teens who were unlikely to take a pledge.

"Virginity pledgers and similar non-pledgers don't differ in the rates of vaginal, oral or anal sex or any other sexual behavior," Rosenbaum said. "Strikingly, pledgers are less likely than similar non-pledgers to use condoms and also less likely to use any form of birth control."

The findings were published in the January issue of the journal Pediatrics.

For the study, Rosenbaum collected data on 934 high school students who had never had sex or had taken a virginity pledge. The data came from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

Rosenbaum matched students who had taken a virginity pledge with those who hadn't. After five years of follow-up, those who had taken a pledge did not differ from teens who hadn't taken a pledge in rates of premarital sex, oral or anal sex, or sexually transmitted diseases.

Teens who had taken a pledge had 0.1 fewer sex partners during the past year, but the same number of partners overall as those who had not pledged. And pledgers started having sex at the same age as non-pledgers, Rosenbaum found.

The study also found that teens who took a virginity pledge were 10 percent less likely to use a condom and less likely to use any other form of birth control than their non-pledging counterparts.

"Sex education programs for teens who take pledges tend to be very negative and inaccurate about condom and birth control information," Rosenbaum said.

The study also found that, five years after taking a virginity pledge, more than 80 percent of pledgers denied ever making such a promise. "This high rate of disaffiliation may imply that nearly all virginity pledgers view pledges as nonbinding," Rosenbaum said.

She said teens who are religious tend to delay having sex, but that has nothing to do with virginity pledges or abstinence-only sex education programs.

Bill Albert, chief program officer for The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, said teens need to be encouraged to delay having sex, but they also need to be given the facts about safe sex.

"When pledgers fell off the wagon, they fell off hard," he said. "What have we gained if we encourage young people only to delay sex until they are older, but when they do become sexually active, they don't protect themselves or their partners?"

"The notion that it has to be either a virginity pledge or encouraging teens to have sex is a false dichotomy," Albert added. "There is a public consensus in this country to encourage teens to delay sex, but also provide them with information about contraception."

More information

For more on teens and sexuality, visit The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 24 (HealthDay News) -- A new, closer look at data on Caesarean section births in the United States suggests that the actual number of unnecessary surgical deliveries is far lower than previously thought.

When looking at birth certificates alone, it appears the number of C-sections being performed in the United States on women who have no risk factors is almost 60 percent. But government experts who analyzed birth certificates and hospital discharge data found the actual number of such deliveries was closer to 4 percent.

"You can't use the birth certificate alone to determine whether or not a woman is at risk for primary Caesarean delivery," said study author Emily Kahn, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's division of reproductive health.

The finding are published in the January issue of the journal Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Nearly one in three babies in the United States was delivered by C-section in 2005, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. That rate is the highest ever, according to background information in the study. The rate of primary Caesareans has increased sharply, while the rate of vaginal delivery after a primary C-section has dropped dramatically.

Trying to assess why the rate has increased, some researchers have turned to birth certificate data to get a population-based estimate of the number of unnecessary C-sections. If the birth certificate says there was "no indicated risk," it appears that those women had Caesareans for no discernable reasons.

Kahn said she and her colleagues were concerned that measuring unnecessary C-sections this way might lead to a large number of these surgeries being classified as unnecessary when, in fact, there were risk factors present to either the mother or baby that necessitated a C-section.

The CDC researchers sifted through data on 565,767 births from women who were considered at low risk for needing a C-section. The women were all 37 weeks' to 41 weeks' pregnant when they went into labor and had singleton pregnancies. All of the women delivered in Georgia hospitals between 1999 and 2004.

More than 70,000 of these women ended up having a Caesarean delivery, and almost 41,000 were listed on the birth certificate as having no risk factors. Yet, in the hospital discharge data, nearly 90 percent of these women had a risk factor listed.

Overall, 58.3 percent of birth certificates suggested no risk factors. But when the researchers pooled the data and combined both birth certificate data and hospital discharge data, they found the rate of Caesareans with no reported risk factors at just 3.9 percent.

Kahn said there are several possible reasons for this discrepancy. One is that the main purpose of a birth certificate is simply to record the birth. Birth certificates aren't completed by physicians, but instead rely on worksheets filled out by the mother. And, she said, hospital discharge data is used to bill the insurance companies and doctors must be very detailed on these reports to get paid, which might make them more accurate.

"Doctors don't touch birth certificates," said Dr. Miriam Greene, an obstetrician at New York University Langone Medical Center and author of the book Frankly Pregnant. "The person who writes up the birth certificate might not be knowledgeable about all the risk factors for C-section, and they see the baby is fine and may think there was no issue."

Kahn said the data from this study suggest that "women who are having primary Caesareans, by and large, do have some sort of risk factor or medical condition that could lead to a Caesarean, though we can't tell on an individual basis."

A lot of the reasons Caesareans are performed are out of a woman's control, but Greene said you can likely reduce your risk by making sure you're well-nourished without gaining too much weight during pregnancy, going to all of your prenatal visits, taking prenatal vitamins and participating in regular exercise.

More information

The March of Dimes has more on the reasons for a C-section.

THURSDAY, Nov. 20 (HealthDay News) -- Two years after U.S. health officials recommended routine HIV testing for Americans 13 to 64, such testing remains hit-and-miss, and the AIDS epidemic marches on.

This, despite the new testing guidelines and better testing methods, according to participants at a conference in suburban Washington D.C. The meeting was designed to review the state of the AIDS epidemic and the unmet role that routine testing can play.

"It's fast, it's cheap, it's easy, it's almost perfect in terms of positive or negative results, and it detects a lethal disease that can now be treated," Dr. John Bartlett, professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine's division of infectious diseases, said during a Thursday teleconference. "It's highly cost-effective and it deals effectively with a major public health problem. This is a slam dunk."

More than 1.1 million Americans are now living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. And more than 56,000 Americans were newly diagnosed with the virus in 2006, officials said.

"While significant progress has been made in the two years since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended routine testing, we are still nowhere near this being the national norm," said Veronica Miller, executive director of the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research, an independent public-private partnership that organized the conference. "Testing for HIV should be as routine as a flu shot, she said.

Testing can save lives.

"Once people learn they are infected with HIV, they take steps to protect their partners," said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention.

The three-day conference pulled together some 300 leading HIV researchers, health-care providers and policymakers to look at the issue of early, routine HIV testing.

Statistics show that before 2006, hospital emergency rooms tested patients for HIV at a rate of just 3.2 per 1,000 visits -- or 0.32 percent. In the two years since, there's been slight improvement, with an estimated 50 to 100 out of 5,000 emergency rooms nationwide routinely testing for HIV, according to Dr. Richard Rothman, of the Johns Hopkins University Department of Emergency Medicine.

A lack of testing occurs in other settings as well, such as correctional facilities and Veterans Administration hospitals. Other research presented at the conference found that just 36 percent of insured individuals seeking treatment for sexually transmitted diseases -- a high-risk group -- were tested for HIV.

And under-testing, of course, means that people who are infected don't start their treatment until later. One study found that 40 percent of patients newly diagnosed with HIV were "late testers," meaning they had AIDS diagnosed within one year of their test.

"Seventy-five percent of those patients had had health-care visits and the most frequent site of visits was the emergency department. There were many missed opportunities," Rothman said.

Despite legislative, medical and social barriers, there have been some successes. They include a voluntary rapid HIV testing program in New York City jails that increased testing from 6,500 to 25,000 inmates between 2004 and 2006. And a Chicago hospital added two health educators to its emergency room, offering rapid testing to patients admitted for medical services. Over 15 months, nearly 2,000 patients were tested, and 15 percent were confirmed HIV-positive. They were set up with care, according to a conference news release.

"I tested positive for HIV 20 years ago and, as a result, have had the opportunity to live a better life and a longer life," said Deadra Lawson Smith, a member of the Living Quilt Project and a community liaison/peer advocate with the South Carolina HIV/AIDS Council.

"People think knowing your status changes your life. It does change your life, but it doesn't change anything else. If you're a mother, you're still a mother. If you're a grandmother, you're still a grandmother. If you're an employee, you're still an employee. If you're a voter, you're still a voter," she said.

More information

To learn more visit the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research.

MONDAY, Nov. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists are reporting the ability to freeze and transplant ovaries, a development that could help preserve fertility in women facing cancer therapy.

"We can transplant ovaries without any loss of ovarian tissue or eggs, and it functions perfectly normally whether it's fresh or frozen," said co-researcher Dr. Sherman Silber, director of the Infertility Center of St. Louis at St. Luke's Hospital.

Silber said the technique could also be used by women who want to delay having children. He reported the findings Nov. 10 at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting, in San Francisco.

In one paper, Silber reported that he and his colleagues had transplanted an ovary from one identical twin to her twin sister, allowing the twin with premature ovarian failure to conceive a child. One year after the transplant, the twin with the transplanted ovary had become pregnant.

But, Silber said, the ability to remove an ovary, freeze it and put it back into the same woman represents the real breakthrough. "We can freeze the ovaries of young women who are going to lose their fertility over time and transplant them back later, and they [the ovaries] won't have aged," he explained.

The technique can benefit cancer patients about to undergo radiation, chemotherapy or bone marrow transplant, which would leave them sterile, Silber said. "But if we take the ovary out, freeze it, save it and transplant it back later, they will be fertile again," he said.

Currently, women can have their eggs frozen and put back after cancer treatment is complete, Silber noted. "But there are disadvantages," he said. "If you put all those eggs in one basket, and she goes through IVF [in vitro fertilization], she can't have any better chance of pregnancy than 50 percent. If she is not pregnant from that, then she's finished."

With ovary transplantation, however, "She's got a normally functioning ovary just like she would have if she were younger. Freezing the ovary and putting it back is much more sure for the patient than egg freezing," he said.

Silber and his colleagues also reported at the meeting on one woman who had her ovary removed, frozen and then restored. But they said they've done the procedure nine times. "It's very repeatable," Silber said. "It's not just a fluke."

Silber said that if a woman receives a cancer diagnosis, "ask about freezing your ovary. In addition, young women who are going to put off childbearing should also think about having one of their ovaries frozen," he added.

Dr. Richard J. Paulson, chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, in Los Angeles, thinks the new reports are encouraging but preliminary.

"This is very exciting," Paulson said. "Fertility preservation is our next major frontier, because what we have found is that women with cancer are increasingly surviving their chemotherapy but are infertile. It would be very helpful if we could have a method to preserve their fertility."

Although women are having their eggs frozen, many women can't go through the procedure to harvest the eggs, Paulson said. "It would be very appealing to take the ovary out and freeze it for the future," he said.

However, Paulson noted that, so far, no woman had become pregnant after her ovary had been removed, frozen and put back.

More information

For more on infertility, visit the U.S. National Library of Medicine.