Top in cardiology: Benefits of fortified eggs; FNIH to study preeclampsia biomarkers

Eating a dozen fortified eggs, which have higher levels of vitamins and less saturated fats than normal eggs, each week appeared to modestly improve cholesterol compared with a diet of two or fewer eggs per week.

“The significance of dietary habits and consuming healthy foods and maintaining overall health has been increasingly debated by physicians and medical societies. This has heightened our attention to the fact that dietary recommendations are most often not evidence-based, and an area in particular which has been broadly and publicly debated is egg consumption,” Nina Nouhravesh, MD, research fellow at the Duke Clinical Research Institute, said during a press conference. “We set to investigate in the PROSPERITY trial the effects of fortified eggs on lipid profile in patients who had heart disease or who were at risk of developing heart disease.”

It was the top story in cardiology last week.

In another top story, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health Biomarkers Consortium launched a 3-year project to study and identify possible biomarkers of preeclampsia in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Read these and more top stories in cardiology below:

Routinely eating fortified eggs may not adversely affect cholesterol

A small study that involved participants eating a dozen fortified eggs per week demonstrated modest potential for improved cholesterol vs. a non-egg supplemented diet, a speaker reported. Read more.

Two key biomarkers could signal early risk for ‘two-person disease’ of preeclampsia

Preeclampsia remains a leading cause of maternal death and a significant cause of maternal and offspring morbidity, yet effective methods to diagnose preeclampsia early in pregnancy and potentially prevent those outcomes are lacking. Read more.

Nighttime outdoor light, air pollution linked to elevated stroke risk

In a prospective cohort study, excessive exposure to outdoor artificial light at night and air pollution were associated with elevated risk for stroke, researchers reported in Stroke. Read more.

Q&A: Minimally invasive heart surgery technique reaches 20 years of use

Heart surgery is normally an invasive procedure involving a sternotomy, in which a surgeon cuts open the patient’s breastbone or sternum. Twenty years ago, Joseph Lamelas, MD, thought it did not always need to be that way. Read more.

Environmental injustices play ‘crucial’ role in coronary heart disease, stroke risk

Environmental injustices such as air pollution and poor transport infrastructure may play a significant role in regional risk for cardiovascular disease and risk factors for it, researchers reported. Read more.