(HealthDay News) – U.S. regulators inspecting a factory in India that has been linked to contaminated eyedrops have uncovered a laundry list of problems. An outbreak of eye infections involving products made at the factory stems from exposure to a highly drug-resistant bacteria known as Pseudomonas aeruginosa. So far, three people have died, while there have been eight reports of lost vision and dozens of infections. U.S. Food and Drug Administration inspectors were at Global Pharma Healthcare Ltd.’s factory from Feb. 20 through March 2, where they identified dirty equipment and clothing, as well as a lack of other safeguards. The FDA issued citations to the company after what appears to be their first-ever visit to the plant. “You used a manufacturing process that lacked assurance of product sterility,” the FDA said in the citation document. Artificial tears drops and ointment involved include those branded as EzriCare and Delsam Pharma. Those products have already been recalled. Among the many problems identified by the FDA were that surfaces touched by product packaging “were not cleaned, sanitized, decontaminated or sterilized.” A machine used to fill product into bottles had a “black, brown greasy deposit” on one of its parts, though company logs said the machine had been cleaned weeks before and not used since. Records about cleaning of filling machines and spaces also had gaps and discrepancies,…  read on >  read on >

(HealthDay News) – Pope Francis was back delivering Mass on Palm Sunday, just one day after he was released from the hospital following a three-day stay for bronchitis. Francis, 86, celebrated in St. Peter’s Square in Rome as about 60,000 people looked on, carrying palm fronds or olive tree branches, CBS News reported. The evidence of the pope’s recent illness could be heard as his voice became strained soon after starting. Francis first rode to the Mass holding a braided palm branch amid a long procession of cardinals, prelates and other Catholics, CBS News reported. The pope delivered a 15-minute homily, talking about homelessness and pain. Francis talked about moments when people feel “extreme pain, love that fails, or is rejected or betrayed.″ Francis cited “children who are rejected or aborted,” as well as broken marriages, “forms of social exclusion, injustice and oppression, [and] the solitude of sickness,” CBS News reported. He also talked about “young people who feel a great emptiness inside without anyone really listening to their cry of pain,” and who “find no other path but that of suicide.” And he spoke of a homeless German man who had died recently under the colonnade circling St. Peter’s Square. “I, too, need Jesus to caress me and be near to me,″ Francis said. “Entire peoples are exploited and abandoned; the poor live on…  read on >  read on >

Your body’s internal clock appears to play a big part in the time of day when severe headaches happen. Migraines and cluster headaches have different characteristics and treatments, but experts have long noted that they share key features: Both are neurological diseases in their own right, rather than symptoms of another underlying condition. And because neither can be easily identified via blood tests or imaging tools, both are diagnosed on the basis of symptoms, with excruciating pain typically topping the list. Now, a new research review is highlighting yet something else they have in common: timing. “Our team found that about 70% of cluster headache patients and 50% of migraine patients have headaches that start at the same time each day,” said study leader Dr. Mark Joseph Burish, director of the Will Erwin Headache Research Center at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. The timing can differ from patient to patient but it tends to be consistent, Burish said. “Patient No. 1 might [regularly] have headaches at 3 a.m., and patient No. 2 might have headaches at noon, but it was consistent,” he explained. “It didn’t matter what time zone or part of the world you were in. The headaches had a daily pattern.” And that suggests that both kinds of headache are at least partially governed by the body’s internal sleep-wake…  read on >  read on >

Assessing heart roundness may be a new way to diagnose cardiovascular conditions, new research suggests. While doctors now use measures like heart chamber size and systolic function to diagnose and monitor cardiomyopathy and other related heart issues, cardiac sphericity (how round the heart is) may be another good tool. “Roundness of the heart isn’t necessarily the problem per se — it’s a marker of the problem,” said co-corresponding study author Dr. Shoa Clarke, a preventive cardiologist and an instructor at Stanford University School of Medicine in California. “People with rounder hearts may have underlying cardiomyopathy or underlying dysfunction with the molecular and cellular functions of the heart muscle. It could be reasonable to ask whether there is any utility in incorporating measurements of sphericity into clinical decision-making,” Clarke suggested. The researchers chose to focus on heart sphericity because clinical experience had suggested it might be associated with heart problems. While past research had primarily focused on sphericity after the onset of heart disease, the research team hypothesized that sphericity might increase before the onset of clinical heart disease. “We have established traditional ways of evaluating the heart, which have been important for how we diagnose and treat heart disease,” Clarke said. “Now, with the ability to use deep-learning techniques to look at medical images at scale, we have the opportunity to identify new ways of…  read on >  read on >

People suffering from sciatica gain lasting relief from a procedure that uses a fine needle to heat nerve roots near the spine, a new clinical trial shows. The minimally invasive procedure, called pulsed radiofrequency (RF), provided superior pain reduction and disability improvement out to one year for patients with sciatica, according to findings published March 28 in the journal Radiology. The procedure could help people with sciatica avoid or delay back surgery, said lead researcher Dr. Alessandro Napoli, an associate professor of radiology with the Policlinico Umberto I – Sapienza University of Rome in Italy. “Pulsed radiofrequency with this method can relieve pain in 10 minutes, with no surgery, no hospitalization, and faster recovery and return to daily activities. It is an important card to play,” Napoli said. People with sciatica have a sharp pain that shoots through their hips and buttocks and down one leg. The condition is typically caused by a herniated or slipped spinal disc that’s putting pressure on the sciatic nerve, the largest nerve on the body. The standard of care is a steroid injection aimed at calming the nerve down, said Dr. Jack Jennings, a professor of radiology and orthopedic surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “The steroids are basically to fool the nerve, to say nothing’s wrong,” said Jennings, who wrote an editorial accompanying…  read on >  read on >

People who are blind are better at sensing their own heartbeats, according to a new study that found blindness appears to heighten one’s ability to feel signals from the inner body. Researchers from Sweden and Poland tested this in a study of 36 blind individuals and the same number of sighted people. Each was asked to count their heartbeats without checking their pulse or touching their body. Using a pulse oximeter, the researchers simultaneously recorded participants’ actual heartbeats. Then, they compared the reported numbers with those actually recorded. Among participants who were blind, average accuracy was 0.78, while the sighted group averaged 0.63 on a scale where 1.0 represented a perfect score. “The blind participants were much better at counting their own heartbeats than the sighted participants in our study and in several previous studies,” said lead researcher Dominika Radziun, a doctoral student in neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. “It gives us important information about the brain’s plasticity and how the loss of one sense can enhance others, in this case the ability to feel what happens inside your own body,” Radziun explained in an institute news release. This ability to sense heartbeats may provide an advantage when it comes to emotional processing, the study authors said. Prior studies have linked people’s ability to sense the body’s internal state to how well they…  read on >  read on >