Study debunks heart attack, baldness link

A new study of more than 5,000 men calls into question the idea that baldness can signal a greater risk of heart disease. Dr. Eyal Shahar of the University of Arizona in Tucson and colleagues found little difference in the heart attack risk between men with full heads of hair and their balding peers.

Hair loss also wasn't related to thickening of the lining of the carotid arteries, the main vessels that supply blood to the brain. An increase in the lining of these arteries, known as carotid intimal-medial thickness, is a warning sign of atherosclerosis.

A candy that fights cavities

Most children are told to stay away from chewy candies to keep their teeth cavity-free, but children in Venezuela who ate a special cavity-fighting candy had 62 percent fewer cavities than those who brushed their teeth regularly, researchers said.

Children in the study were testing the effectiveness of BasicMints, an experimental fluoride-free treatment designed to mimic a component in human saliva that neutralizes acids in the mouth that can erode tooth enamel.

Seven eggs a week raises risk of death

Middle-aged men who ate seven or more eggs a week had a higher risk of earlier death, U.S. researchers say. Men with diabetes who ate any eggs at all raised their risk of death during a 20-year period studied, according to the study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

62 deaths possibly linked to heparin

U.S. regulators have received 62 reports of deaths during the last 15 months of patients who were treated with the blood-thinner heparin and suffered allergic reactions or low blood pressure, the Food and Drug Administration says, Those are the problems that prompted Baxter International Inc to recall most of its heparin products in February.

Drugs reverse heart disease in diabetics

Aggressive use of drugs to lower cholesterol and blood pressure helped reverse heart disease in people with diabetes, U.S. researchers said. The three-year study of 499 Native American adults with type-2 diabetes showed that lowering blood pressure and cholesterol more than is usually recommended helped reverse thickening of the arteries and damage to the heart.

Donating blood won't cause cancer

Frequent blood donation is not harmful to your health, a new study confirms. "No one should worry that giving blood causes cancer," Dr. Gustaf Edgren of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health. "If anything, blood donation may actually be good for you."

Russians approve cancer vaccine

Russian regulators have approved the world's first cancer vaccine, validating an unusual strategy by its maker to introduce the product even though it failed a late-stage clinical trial. Shares of Antigenics Inc., the tiny New York-based biotechnology company which has been developing the vaccine for 11 years, rose as much as 58 percent on the news.

Mumps makes comeback in U.S.

Mumps made an alarming comeback in the United States in 2006 and may take years to completely eradicate, federal health experts reported.

The outbreak of the viral disease came despite the widespread use of a second dose of a mumps vaccine, produced by Merck, beginning in 1990.

Infant heart defects tied to smoking

A woman who smokes during pregnancy increases the risk that her child will be born with a heart defect, a new study published in Pediatrics shows. To clarify the relationship between prenatal smoke exposure and congenital heart defects, Dr. Sadia Malik of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock and her colleagues evaluated 3,067 infants born with heart defects, unrelated to genetic syndromes, who were included in the National Birth Defects Prevention Study. These infants were compared with 3,947 babies with normal hearts. The parents of all of the infants were also evaluated.