Health Highlights: Jan. 21, 2010

Jan. 22 -- Here are some of the latest health and medical news developments, compiled by the editors of HealthDay:

Same-Sex Couples Good Parents: Study

Same-sex couples are as good as male/female couples when it comes to parenting, say researchers who reviewed 81 studies of one- and two-parent families, including gay, lesbian and heterosexual couples.

"Children being raised by same-gender parents, on most all of the measures that we care about, self-esteem, school performance, social adjustment and so on, seem to be doing just fine and, in most cases, are statistically indistinguishable from kids raised by married moms and dads on these measures," said review co-author Timothy Biblarz, of the University of Southern California, USA Today reported.

"It's more about the quality of the parenting than the gender of the parents," noted co-author Judith Stacey of New York University.

The researchers also found that "two women who choose to parent together are slightly more likely than a heterosexual couple to be actively committed to hands-on parenting. We don't have data yet on two men parenting, but I think it will come out fairly similar," Stacey said, USA Today reported.

The review findings will be published Friday in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

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Herpes Drug Doesn't Reduce HIV Infection Risk

The herpes drug acyclovir doesn't reduce the risk of HIV infection, a new study says.

The five-year trial included more than 3,400 African couples in which one partner had HIV and one partner was HIV-free, Agence France Presse reported.

The infected partners were randomly selected to take twice-daily doses of acyclovir or a placebo.

During the study, there were 41 HIV infections among couples in which the infected partner took acyclovir, and 43 HIV infections among those who took a placebo. The researchers said this wasn't a significant difference, AFP reported.