A new study by Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine offers a revealing factoid on Chicago’s murder wave of the past few years—but it’s not clear what is the cause, and what is the effect. According to Feinberg research published in the medical journal Injury Epidemiology, the share of high school freshmen and sophomores here who carry guns was 9.21 percent in 2013, the latest year for which complete figures are available. Feinberg’ s Samaa Kamal, Karen Sheehan and Joe Feinglass based their report on responses to the Youth Behavior Risk survey, a survey in which students voluntarily answer questions anonymously. “Our findings suggest that there is a clear link between the increase in Chicago students carrying guns in 2013 and the city’s spike in gun violence in 2016,” Feinglass said in a statement. “The city was fertile ground for this increase in shootings.”

“This is what we hope will be a breakthrough in finding a way to treat a lifelong, debilitating blood disorder with a one-time treatment,” said Alexis A. Thompson, one of the paper’s lead authors and head of hematology at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. An estimated 288,000 people worldwide suffer from βbeta-thalassemia, in which genetic mutations cause the body to make insufficient beta globin, a molecule needed to produce healthy red blood cells. Patients’ defective red blood cells often die before they fully mature, resulting in anemia, or they burst open while in circulation, releasing iron into the bloodstream that can cause organ damage.

Family physicians and internists also have many responsibilities competing for their attention in a short visit, like staying up on continually evolving recommendations in many other areas from blood pressuring monitoring to screening for high cholesterol. “It’s not a criticism of primary care physicians – they have many, many things on their plate,” says Dr. Edward Schaeffer, chair of urology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and a professor of urology at Northwestern University in Chicago. So I understand why the data suggests it’s not a good test in the hands of … a primary care physician, but I don’t think that means that the test is a bad test. If you ask me to interpret an echocardiogram, I couldn’t do it.”

“After seeing the amazing technology behind modern movies and the video games I play with my kids, I started wondering how we could apply some of that same technology to patient care,” wrote Dr. Michael Walsh, a Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital neurological surgeon, via email. According to the hospital statement, a panel of judges, mostly affiliated with Northwestern Medicine, selected the Lake Forest initiative on March 21 with the funds provided by a local ambulance company. “We plan to have enough devices such as iPads in our office so that all of our neurosurgery patients can begin learning about our team as well as basic neurosurgical concepts while they are in the waiting room, with more advanced platforms such as interactive wall boards and virtual reality, which will be used during their time with the care providers,” Walsh said.