Short course: Birth defects more common in IVF babies: Study

The researchers — whose findings were published in the journal Fertility and Sterility — did not determine why fertility treatments are tied to a higher risk of birth defects or whether it is even responsible.

In vitro fertilization (IVF),in which the mother’s egg is fertilized outside of her body and then transferred to her womb, has been available to would-be mothers for more than three decades.

Zhibin Hu at Nanjing Medical University and colleagues collected the results of as many as 46 studies.

For more than 124,000 children born through IVF,the risk of having a birth defect was 37 percent higher than that of the other children,they found.

Do clean teeth protect against heart disease?

NEW YORK: Older adults who get thorough dental cleanings may be somewhat less likely to have a heart attack or stroke than their peers who are less careful about oral hygiene,a new study suggests.

The study,of nearly 22,000 Taiwanese adults age 50 and up,found that those who’d had a professional tooth “scaling” in the past year were less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke over the next seven years.

Tooth scaling,sometimes called a deep cleaning,involves removing the “plaques” that can build up on the teeth and deep in tooth pockets within the gum line. Those plaques harbor bacteria that can lead to gum disease. The new findings,reported in the American Journal of Medicine,do not prove that a good dental cleaning will cut your risk of heart problems.

But the study is in line with past research that has linked gum disease to an increased risk of heart disease,said lead researcher Dr Zu-Yin Chen,a cardiology fellow at Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan.

Value of screening for kidney disease unclear

NEW YORK: Screening people to catch early kidney disease may sound like a good idea,but there is no research to prove that it’s worthwhile,according to a new review.

The disease is very common among older adults,and high blood pressure and diabetes are the main risk factors. In its early stages,chronic kidney disease usually has no symptoms. But there are blood and urine tests that can catch signs of trouble,so it may sound logical to use them to screen everyone for early kidney dysfunction.

The problem is,no clinical trials have tested the effectiveness of widespread screening,according to the new review published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Nor have there been clinical trials to see monitoring of people with early kidney disease. Controlled clinical trials — in which people are randomly assigned to have a particular intervention or not — are considered “gold standard” of medical research.

“This doesn’t mean (screening and monitoring) are not beneficial,” said Dr Howard Fink,a staff physician at Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis,who led the study. “It is uncertain.”