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Younger generations are aging more rapidly, and this could be leading to an increased risk of cancer, a new study says. Northwestern Medicine has more on biological versus chronological age. People born in or after 1965 are 17% more likely to be experiencing accelerated aging compared to seniors born between 1950 and 1954, researchers found. Accelerated aging also was associated with a 16% increased risk of late-onset GI cancer and a 23% increased risk of late-onset uterine cancer among older adults. Researchers presented their findings Sunday at a meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in San Diego. Studies presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Earthquakes are always unnerving. But for some, the aftershocks can go on beyond the actual tremors: People can experience anxiety, sleep problems and other health issues in the hours and days after a quake. One such effect is a sense of dizziness after an especially large or frightening earthquake. “We see it with patients who get off cruises too, or get off a boat. They’ll be lightheaded or have a sensation of movement for days or even months,” said Landon Duyka, MD, an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Northwestern Medicine. If you are dizzy or feel like the ground is still moving after an earthquake ends, experts recommend treating it as you would other forms of motion sickness. Try looking at a spot far away and focusing on it, Dr. Duyka said, which “can often help what we call the vestibular system — or your balance system — settle down.” If your dizzy spell doesn’t go away on its own within a few hours, or if it is particularly intense, you may want to look into over-the-counter antihistamines, like Dramamine, Dr. Duyka said.

There is a dangerous gap in medical care between men and women. While they are equally likely to suffer heart attacks, women are more likely to die from theirs. It’s one of the many symptoms of the medical system’s neglect of women. Life-saving statins, like so many other medications, have been developed based on clinical trials that primarily recruited men. As a result, many women don’t receive prescriptions for drugs that could help them the most. Perhaps the most recent instance of women being left out of heart disease research can be seen in the trials of highly popular diabetes drugs such as semaglutide, sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy. The drugs cause dramatic weight loss, which made researchers wonder if they might lower heart disease rates, too. They do, according to several studies, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration now approves their use to prevent heart disease. Robert Kushner, MD, a professor of medicine at Northwestern University who led some of the weight-loss studies, says he was surprised at the discrepancy between the enrollment of women in the obesity trials of semaglutide—in which about three-quarters of volunteers were women—and in the heart disease trials, in which women represented fewer than 28% of participants. He says researchers recruited people already being treated for heart disease. “Predominantly, the ones who are getting care and being seen around the world were men,” Kushner says.

Dietary supplements include vitamins, fish oil, herbs, minerals like calcium, and more. And if you take one, you’re not alone. About half of U.S. adults do. But should you? That’s a question for your doctor or dietitian, says Linda Van Horn, PhD, RD, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University. “I get some concern when I see people take one of these and one of those, just because they’ve read somewhere that a supplement is helpful,” Van Horn says. “Imbalances can easily occur, and you may not be aware of it.” Food is the best way to get your vitamins and minerals. But it sometimes can be hard to eat enough fresh veggies, fruits, whole grains, and other healthy options. A multivitamin can be a safe way to boost your nutrients. But multivitamins aren’t likely to help you live longer or lower your chances of long-term health problems. That includes heart disease, cancer, or diabetes. And there’s no evidence that vitamins can help you think or remember better.

Four years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, new data shows how severely the pandemic impacted young people’s mental health, particularly girls. During the pandemic, there was an increase in severe emergency room psychiatric visits for children and teens, including for conditions like bipolar disorder, substance abuse disorders, and schizophrenia, according to research published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine. “We observed a unique vulnerability for girls during the pandemic, which indicates that girls’ mental health requires more attention,” the study’s lead author, Jennifer Hoffmann, MD, MS, emergency medicine physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, said in a statement. In the last months of 2021, the U.S. surgeon general described the pandemic’s impact on youth mental health as “devastating,” and organizations representing child psychiatrists, pediatricians and children’s hospitals declared a national emergency for youth mental health.

According to the U.S. Health and Human Service’s Office on Women’s Health, the average age of menopause is 52 in the United States. Early menopause occurs before age 45 and premature menopause occurs before 40, the agency says. Both early and premature menopause occur for the same reasons, including family history, smoking, chemotherapy, pelvic radiation, surgical removal of the ovaries, hysterectomies or other health conditions. While research on women’s health lags, there’s still enough evidence for experts to know that starting menopause early can contribute to health problems later. “There’s huge huge medical repercussions,” Lauren Streicher, a certified menopause practitioner and clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, tells TODAY.com. “They are, in most cases, more than twice as likely to develop a long-term medical issue than someone who goes through menopause at the predictable time, particularly when we look at heart disease.” For people who can take hormone replacement therapy, Streicher says “there’s consensus in the medical community” that they should be taking it.

Almost 25 million adults in the U.S. have high cholesterol, which puts them at a higher risk for a heart attack or stroke in the next decade. But a much bigger portion have what’s called borderline high cholesterol, an in-between place that’s not quite high, but not quite within a normal range. High cholesterol is defined as having a total cholesterol number of 240 mg/dL or above. Someone has borderline cholesterol, meanwhile, when their total cholesterol is in the 200 to 239 range. “We create these thresholds—which are admittedly somewhat artificial—to classify people so we can understand if we need to do further analysis or assessment to understand their risk for cardiovascular disease,” says Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, past president of the American Heart Association and a professor of cardiology and the chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. There’s some flexibility: Some people may be completely healthy with a total cholesterol level of 235, while others could be at risk at 205. It depends on a person’s other risk factors. But broadly speaking, these thresholds help doctors make decisions about patient care. People with total cholesterol levels below 200 tend to have a lower risk of developing heart disease, while those over 240 have a higher risk. Those who land from 200 to 239 are somewhere in the middle, Lloyd-Jones says.

Gibbon calls the landmark surgery his “Triple L” — two lungs and a liver. “To our knowledge, this is the first known case in the nation where a patient with advanced lung cancer has successfully received a combined lung-liver transplant,” said Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery and director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute. Bharat performed Gibbon’s lung transplant. Northwestern University offers a first-of-its-kind clinical program called Double Lung Replacement and Multidisciplinary Care (DREAM), and Gibbon turned to doctors there to save his life. Surgeons implanted the new lungs first, while the donor liver was kept alive outside the body thanks to a machine that pumps warm, oxygenated and nutrient-enriched blood through the organ — a technology the docs call “liver in a box.” “This DREAM program is new territory for transplantation and the fact that I could experience it and have a wonderful outcome makes me feel so blessed,” Gibbon said. “I wouldn’t be here today without Northwestern Medicine.”

Researchers cannot chalk up increases in the maternal mortality rate to an advancing age of women getting pregnant, a Northwestern researcher says. A study of pregnancy-related deaths by a team including Sadiya Khan, associate professor of cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, found that maternal mortality from 2014 and 2021 increased among every age group, disproving the widely believed hypothesis that the problem stems from more people having children later in life. Khan’s study, published March 18 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that the Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) in the United States increased significantly from 16.5 per 100,000 live births in 2014 to 31.8 in 2021. The near doubling of the rate in that period was taken from online publicly available U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Control’s Wonder databases. “Maternal mortality rates are higher in the U.S. than in most other high-income countries and have increased substantially in recent years, yet the majority of these deaths are preventable.” the study states.

In February, in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F., was thrown into the spotlight when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in the state should be considered children. The decision led to a pause on I.V.F. procedures in parts of the state, and even a pause on shipping embryos out of state, to avoid potential criminal liability. I.V.F., however, is hardly guaranteed to be successful: The procedure still has a risk of miscarriage, though the likelihood is lower because the embryos have been genetically tested and only the most viable are typically implanted. “The vast majority of people who are doing it are truly desperate and have a medical reason for doing it,” said Tarun Jain, MD, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University. “It is a very challenging, time-consuming, physically and emotionally draining process, and a big financial burden if your insurance doesn’t cover it.”