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MONDAY, June 8, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- New research is shining a light on a group particularly vulnerable to the new coronavirus: People with an intellectual or developmental disability (IDD), cared for either by family at home or in group homes. People with these types of disabilities include those with Down syndrome, cerebral palsy and other conditions, and the data shows they're significantly more likely to die after contracting COVID-19 than the general public. According to the database used in the study, the virus claimed the lives of just under 3% of COVID-19 patients between the ages of 18 and 74 who did not have an IDD. But among COVID-19 patients who do have an IDD, that figure rose by half, to 4.5%. IDD patients under the age of 18 are also more likely to die from...

MONDAY, June 8, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- Women with heart defects experience far more cardiovascular problems during pregnancy than those without, yet only half get a recommended test to assess their heart health before giving birth, according to new research. The study, published Monday in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, found that during pregnancy, women with congenital heart disease experienced adverse conditions 34 to 63 times more often than those without heart defects. The conditions included high blood pressure in the lungs, heart rate problems, dangerous heart rhythms and cardiac arrest. But just 56% of these women received the comprehensive echocardiograms experts recommend. "We were surprised that some...

MONDAY, June 8, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Back before coronavirus took over the headlines, every week seemed to bring another report about artificial intelligence besting human doctors at everything from diagnosing skin cancer to spotting pneumonia on chest X-rays. But these artificial intelligence (AI) tools -- computer programs that get better at performing a task by being "trained" on the right kind of data -- are years away from being used to help diagnose real-life patients, according to the doctors helping to develop and test them. "We still have a lot of unknowns in terms of generalizing and validation of these systems before we can start using them as standard of care," said Dr. Matthew Hanna, a pathologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York...

MONDAY, June 8, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- People infected with COVID-19 who need surgery have much higher odds of dying soon afterward, a new study finds. Infected patients who had surgery died at rates nearly equal to those of the sickest COVID-19 patients in intensive care units, the researchers found. For the study, the investigators looked at data on more than 1,100 surgical patients with COVID-19 at 235 hospitals in 24 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. Overall, 24% died within 30 days. Deaths were high among four subgroups: elective surgery (19%); emergency surgery (26%); minor surgery such as hernia repair (16%); and major surgical procedures such as hip or cancer surgery (27%), the findings showed. Deaths rates were higher among men (28%) than women...