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THURSDAY, April 13, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- The kids, no matter how they are conceived, are all right.That is the main takeaway from a new study by British researchers that found no real differences in the psychological well-being of kids who were born via sperm/egg donation or surrogacy and those born naturally by the time they reached the age of 20."Children born through third-party reproductive donation -- egg donation, sperm donation or surrogacy -- are well-adjusted and have positive relationships with their parents right up to adulthood," said study author Susan Golombok, former director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge.For the study, the researchers followed 65 families with children born via assisted reproduction from infancy until the child...

THURSDAY, April 13, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- A teenager’s brain power appears to have little bearing on whether they will become overweight or obese as adults.British researchers found that, on average, sharper teens weighed only slightly less in adulthood than siblings who scored lower on tests of thinking skills, according to a new study published April 13 in the journal PLOS Medicine.The difference amounted to just under a half-pound for a 6-foot-tall adult, said lead author Liam Wright, a senior research fellow in population health at University College London.“We found a very small association that in practice means that, on average, siblings with higher cognitive ability are unlikely to weigh much less than siblings with lower cognitive ability,” he said.The research...

THURSDAY, April 13, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought illegally to the United States as children may soon be eligible to receive federally funded health care.President Joe Biden on Thursday announced the extension of eligibility for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act health insurance exchanges to those in DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. "Today, my administration is announcing our plan to expand health coverage for Dreamers, the thousands of young people brought to the U.S. as kids," Biden said in a Tweet announcing the change. "We’re not done fighting for their pathway to citizenship, but we're getting them the opportunities they deserve in the meantime."While other classes of immigrants, such as those with temporary...

THURSDAY, April 13, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Daytime naps longer than a half-hour appear to nearly double a person’s risk of developing an irregular heartbeat, a new study reports.People who nap 30 minutes or more a day have a 90% higher risk of developing the heart rhythm disorder atrial fibrillation (a-fib) than those who take shorter naps, according to research presented Thursday at a meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, in Malaga, Spain. “Our study indicates that snoozes during the day should be limited to less than 30 minutes,” study author Dr. Jesus Diaz-Gutierrez of Juan Ramon Jimenez University Hospital in Huelva, Spain, said in a society news release. “People with disturbed night-time sleep should avoid relying on napping to make up the shortfall.”Research...