Common vitamins no help for women's hearts

Middle-aged women at risk for heart disease received little benefit from taking vitamins C, E or beta carotene, researchers said.

Though vitamin supplements provided no heart benefit, eating a diet rich in those vitamins does make for a healthier heart, their study noted.

Experts believe a nutritious diet rich in these vitamins protect the body's cardiovascular system by counteracting compounds known as "free radicals." These harmful compounds build up in the body and can damage artery linings, encourage blood clots and alter the function of blood vessels.

"Single antioxidants (vitamins) may not reflect the complex vitamins and nutrients found in foods, which may explain the discrepancies between most intervention trials and studies of fruits and vegetables," wrote study author Nancy Cook of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Better living means less stomach cancer

New cases of stomach cancer will likely fall 25 percent over the next 10 years in Western countries because of better living conditions, Dutch researchers said.

Stomach cancer is one of the most common types of cancer worldwide and usually kills within five years, said Ernst Kuipers, a researcher at the Erasmus MC University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, who led the study published in the journal Gut.

But in a study covering the past 15 years, the researchers found that the number of people showing symptoms known to be precursors to stomach cancer had fallen by 25 percent, Kuipers said.

Kuipers said the declines stemmed from improved living conditions that had helped prevent the spread of the Helicobacter pylori bacterium, which has been linked to stomach cancer.

Tape measure gives clue to heart risk

A quick check around the waist with a tape measure may be a better way of telling if you are at risk of heart disease than stepping on a scale, researchers said.

Even if people are not overweight, those with larger waistlines are more likely to show the early signs of heart disease than those with smaller waists, the team at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas reported.

Researchers used magnetic resonance imaging and electron beam computed tomography scans to look for early signs of clogged arteries and found a direct relationship between waist size and early indications of heart disease, regardless of the patients' overall weight.

"It's a straight-line relationship all the way down to the lowest levels," said Dr. James de Lemos, a cardiologist who led the study. "This isn't the kind of thing that is only relevant if you are one of the obese people."

Red meat linked to cancer recurrence

Colon cancer survivors with diets heavy in red meat and fatty foods are more than three times as likely to suffer a recurrence of their disease or die from it than those who avoid such foods, a study found.

Previous studies had shown that a high-fat diet, especially one with lots of red meat, may increase a person's risk of developing colon cancer, a leading cancer killer.

This study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, was the first to show how diet affects whether colon cancer returns in people previously treated for it, the researchers said.

In the study of 1,009 people, researchers found colon cancer survivors who ate a diet heavy in red meat, sweets and refined grains were 3.3 times more likely to have a colon cancer recurrence or die than survivors who ate more fruits, vegetables, poultry and fish.

Vaccines prevent, but can't treat HPV

Vaccines designed to prevent infection from two strains of the human papillomavirus that cause most cases of cervical cancer offer no benefit as a treatment for women who are already infected, U.S. researchers said.

"You should not get the vaccine because you want to treat an existing infection," said Allen Hildesheim of the National Cancer Institute, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Recent toy recall renews lead fears

Lead exposure in Americans has fallen since the 1970s to all-time low levels, experts said, even as big recalls of imported toys made with lead paint have put a renewed focus on lead poisoning in children.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said about 310,000 U.S. children ages 1 to 5 have high levels of the toxin in their blood. It said the major source of lead exposure among children is lead-based paint and lead-contaminated dust in deteriorating buildings, not ingesting paint from toys.