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 >

Sen. Mitch McConnell is back home more than two weeks after he fell at a private dinner and was hospitalized with a concussion and broken rib. The Senate Minority Leader spent five days in the hospital and the remainder of the 2-1/2 weeks following his fall in inpatient physical therapy. “I’m in frequent touch with my Senate colleagues and my staff,” McConnell said in a statement released Saturday. “I look forward to returning in person to the Senate soon.” McConnell said he resumed talking directly with his team leadership last Tuesday, saying he was “eager” to return. McConnell, 81, was injured March 8 at a private dinner at a Washington hotel. He’s not the only senator currently out for illness. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is recovering from shingles, while Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) is receiving inpatient treatment for clinical depression. Although it’s not clear exactly when McConnell will return to his office, he said he will be working from home for now. The Senate starts an Easter recess Thursday and won’t reconvene until April 17, the Washington Post reported. More information The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on concussion. SOURCE: Washington Post  read on >

Boys born to women who had COVID-19 during pregnancy may be at risk for developmental delays, a new study suggests. Delays in speech and motor function were the most commonly diagnosed conditions in these children at 12 months. They were seen in boys but not in girls, the study authors said. “These findings suggest that male offspring exposed to SARS-CoV-2 in utero may be at increased risk for neurodevelopmental disorders,” said lead researcher Dr. Andrea Edlow. She is an associate professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, in Boston. However, she added, “The motor and speech delays noted in our study do not, per se, reveal anything about risk for autism, ADHD [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder], or other diagnoses, which are made later in life. Our study cannot yet answer those questions, and only points to the need for longer-term follow-up of these children, given that increased neurodevelopmental risk has already been noted.” It’s not uncommon that infections during pregnancy affect infants, Edlow pointed out. “Multiple viral and bacterial infections in pregnancy have been associated with increased risk for neurodevelopmental diagnoses in offspring. The common thread is maternal immune activation during infection in pregnancy, rather than a specific pathogen,” she explained. As to why boys but not girls are affected, Edlow said that is also seen with other infections. “Boys are known to…  read on >  read on >