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SATURDAY, April 30, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- If a mother reaches for cakes, chocolates or other snacks when she's feeling down, her children could become emotional eaters as well.Kids' chances of becoming emotional eaters are shaped by both their natural eating tendencies and their parent's influence, according to a new British study. Emotional eating refers to indulging in "comfort" foods when feeling sad or anxious, not because you're hungry.“Our findings suggest that children who were more motivated to eat were more predisposed to associate food with emotions," said study co-author Rebecca Stone, a Ph.D. student at Aston University in Birmingham."Our research supports the idea that emotional eating is a learned behavior which children often develop in preschool years, but that...

FRIDAY, April 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- The origins of a continuing outbreak of acute, potentially lethal hepatitis striking children in countries around the world has experts mystified. But a cluster of recent cases in Alabama all show ties to common viruses, according to a new report from researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The official World Health Organization tally of such cases stands at 169 across 11 countries, although media reports suggest the number is now closer to 200. In these cases, otherwise healthy children have developed the liver disease so severe as to require hospitalization. In the WHO case count, 17 of the children required a liver transplant to survive, and one child died.The new CDC report hones in on cases in one U.S. state:...

FRIDAY, April 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Mom's voice may be music to a young child's brain, but the teen brain prefers to change the station, a new study finds.Past research using brain imaging has revealed how important a mother's voice is to younger children: The sound stimulates not only hearing-related parts of the brain, but also circuits involved in emotions and "reward" — in a way strange voices simply do not.The new study, published April 28 in the Journal of Neuroscience, shows that things start to change around the age of 13. At that point, the brain's vocal preferences shift, tuning mom out in favor of unfamiliar voices.That may ring true to anyone who has ever raised a teenager.But the findings offer an actual "brain basis" for kids' behavior changes, said lead...

FRIDAY, April 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Rates of high blood pressure among pregnant women in the United States are on the rise and now occur in at least one in seven hospital deliveries, a new government report warns.The overall rate of what are called hypertensive disorders in pregnancy increased from about 13% of hospital deliveries in 2017 to 16% in 2019, but rates are higher among certain racial/ethnic groups. In addition, the researchers found that the rate was highest among women older than 45 (31%), and also high among those in rural counties (16%), in lower-income ZIP codes (16%), and those in the South (16%) and Midwest (15%). High blood pressure in pregnancy can cause severe complications, such as heart attack and stroke, and is a leading cause of pregnancy-related death...