If there are any teens in your life, you know the drill: Don’t try to talk to them, even if they’re in the same room as you.

Send a text message instead.

But new studies show that all those text messages come with real risks, and not just in the form of thumb and wrist pain.

One new study finds that kids who send the most text messages are more likely to engage in bad behavior… while another shows how all that texting may be keeping them awake at night.

In the first new study, researchers found that kids who send the most text messages–an average of 120 per school day (yes, it’s possible!)–have a much higher risk of engaging in unhealthy behaviors than those who send few messages.

Researchers say these super-texters were 40 percent more likely to have tried smoking and 43 percent more likely to be binge drinkers than those who didn’t text much.

These kids were also 41 percent more likely to have used drugs, 55 percent more likely to have been involved in a fight and 3.5 times more likely to have had sex.

They’re also 90 percent more likely to have had four or more sexual partners.

The same study found that 11.5 percent of kids spent more than three hours a day on social networking Web sites like Facebook, and that these children were also more likely to be smokers, drinkers, drug users and sexually active than those who spent less time online.

But let’s get back to texting–because another new study finds that kids who can’t sleep might be staying up just to send and receive those little one-liners.

A researcher who examined 40 insomniac children and young adults between the ages of 8 and 22 years old found that the kids were actually sending out waves of text messages after their supposed bedtimes.

In all, these kids were sending an average of 33.5 texts each night after lights-out. Some of them even woke up throughout the night to check for new messages–and respond to them.

Truth be told, that sounds like some adults with their BlackBerry devices–so maybe the apples aren’t falling all that far from some of those trees.

Of course, none of this means your text-happy children or grandchildren will turn into drinking, smoking, sex-addicted insomniacs. But keep tabs on them just the same–even if you have to send a text message to schedule a little face time.

Sometimes, it seems as if the kids who haven’t been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder might start feeling left out.

Who knows, maybe they’ll even act up just to get some attention.

A new survey finds an alarming number of children now have the condition–with 10 percent of all kids between the ages of 4 and 17 diagnosed with ADHD in 2007.

That’s 5.4 million kids overall–up from 4.4 million just four years earlier, or a rise of 22 percent, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey.

The biggest boost was in Hispanic children, who saw a 53 percent increase in ADHD cases. But the more alarming number is in older kids–researchers say there was a 42 percent jump in the 15-to-17 age group.

It’s alarming, because kids that age have been known to fake the condition simply to get their hands on the dangerous stimulant drugs used to treat it. There’s even an active online community for kids looking for tips on faking ADHD to get those pills.

Type “Fake ADHD” into the Google search box, and it will even offer “Fake ADHD for Adderall” as a suggestion.

Parents everywhere thank you, Google.

But the fact is, even the kids who aren’t faking it may not have ADHD… because the problem in many cases isn’t with the child.

It’s with the teachers, doctors and even parents who are just too quick to diagnose any disruptive child as an ADHD case, write a prescription and send him off to the playground with a fresh supply of pills.

Two recent studies even found that millions of American children may have been misdiagnosed with the condition simply because they’re younger–and are therefore less mature–than their classmates.

Researchers looked at children and ADHD diagnoses and arranged them by birthdates, and found that the youngest kid in any given kindergarten class is 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest.

And these kids are also being given those powerful and addictive brain-altering meds… even in kindergarten.

But these children don’t need meds, because ADHD–real ADHD, and not the bogus diagnosis being slapped on kids who simply act up–is generally the result of poor nutrition and hormonal imbalances.

Kids raised on pizza, fast food and energy drinks are missing nutrients that are crucial to brain development.

Let them eat better, and you’ll often find they’ll behave better.

Then, don’t be afraid to work in a little honest-to-goodness discipline–that works, too.

There’s no telling where the next great advance in medicine will appear–but chances are, it won’t be in one of the leading medical journals.

Research hasn’t just slipped in recent years. It’s just about collapsed–and now, one leading scientist says that up to 90 percent of all published studies are flawed.

Some are biased. Some are designed with a specific outcome in mind. Some are deceptive. And plenty of them are flat-out wrong.

And doctors make decisions every day based on these studies–decisions about treatments for you and your family.

Dr. John Ioannidis, who Atlantic Monthly calls “one of the most influential scientists alive,” has made a living taking the medical journals apart page-by-page.

And he says that even “gold standard” research can be manipulated to the point where these studies simply can’t be trusted–which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s seen the research used to get drugs like Avandia, Vioxx, Meridia and Bextra approved.

In one analysis, Ioannidis and his researchers looked at the 49 studies that have made the biggest difference in medicine over the past 13 years based on how often they were cited and the prestige of the journals that published them.

Of the 49 articles, 45 led to treatments used by doctors–including hormone replacement therapy for menopause and daily aspirin for heart risk.

I don’t have to tell you how those turned out–and those weren’t the only ones to have serious problems: Of those 45 new treatments, 34 were later re-tested… and 14 of them–41 percent–were either wrong or exaggerated.

Looks like the gold standard is more of a flexible piece of plastic.

In another analysis, Ioannidis found that flawed studies are often cited even after they’re discredited, sometimes for years. One study was still being cited as correct more than a dozen years after it had been completely disproved.

In yet another study, he estimated that 80 percent of all non-randomized trials are later proven wrong.

If you want to believe these are innocent mistakes and ordinary carelessness, you can–but I’ve told you before about some of the tricks used regularly to help make sure researchers get the results they or their Big Pharma backers want:

• Shortened studies favor Big Pharma
• The scientific spin cycle
• Why drug studies can’t be trusted

Dr. Ioannidis says many studies are actually set up from the get-go to favor the drug. A clinical trial, for example, might compare the drug to a treatment already known to be inferior–making the drug look better.

“Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said in The Atlantic.

And that means those answers were never really answers to begin with.

I’m not done with research tricks yet… keep reading for some stunning news on placebos.

Placebos are often thought of as sugar pills–a “blank” pill with no real effects to use in drug studies.

But like so much of medicine, that’s just a myth.

In fact, a placebo can be just about anything a researcher–or the drug company funding the research–wants it to be.

And they don’t even have to tell us what’s in it.

How’s that for a placebo effect?

A new study looks at the ingredients of placebos, and let’s just say the report is more notable for what it doesn’t contain.

Researchers reviewed 176 studies published in major medical journals in 2008 and 2009 to find out what placebos were used. Instead, they found that just 8.2 percent of all pill studies disclosed the ingredients of their placebos.

When it came to injections, just 26.7 percent of studies disclosed the contents of the placebo.

That makes it impossible to truly replicate a study, and could explain why repeated trials on the same drug can reach wildly different conclusions.

But the worst part of all is that the FDA doesn’t require researchers to disclose their placebos–creating a loophole ripe for exploitation.

After all, the placebo is every bit as important to the study as the drug itself–just look at some of the tricks they’ve pulled in cases where we DO know the ingredients they used.

In one clinical trial for the HPV vaccine Gardasil–the shot that’s blamed for sickening hundreds of girls and killing dozens–researchers put aluminum in the placebo.

Not exactly a harmless, inert substance, is it?

But it almost certainly helped make Gardasil’s notorious side effects look a little better, since an aluminum-packed placebo is bound to create a few problems of its own.

In one case cited by the researchers behind the new report, scientists studying a drug for anorexia linked to cancer used lactose for the placebo.

Since cancer patients are often lactose-intolerant, the drug and loaded “placebo” looked like they had similar side effects.

But really, none of this is surprising.

Researchers working on drugs are desperate to prove their pills are safe and effective–something that hasn’t
happened much in recent years.

Most experimental drugs that show promise in lab rats come up empty once they reach placebo-controlled trials.

In fact, repeated studies on already-approved antidepressant drugs find many of them can’t beat real placebos.

And that has to make you wonder what was in the placebos they used in the studies that got those meds approved in the first place.

I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t sugar.