As many American women reckon with the sudden loss of their constitutional right to abortion, conservatives have floated an alternative they say makes abortion less necessary: safe haven laws. But American women – even in states where in recent years they have had little access to abortion – rarely use safe havens as an option. Northwestern University professor Katie Watson, who teaches law, ethics and humanities to medical students, said the conservative argument that safe havens are an alternative to abortion is disingenuous. “When a person has an abortion, they are saying, ‘I do not want to have a baby.’ And adoption (or using a safe haven) does mean they don’t have to parent the child, but they still had a baby, which was the thing that most people having an abortion did not want to do,” Watson said. Watson further shared that the existence of safe haven laws may not be the only reason why fewer infants are dying by homicide. “Our recognition and treatment of prenatal and perinatal depression is so much better. The awareness that pregnancy can mess with your head and your mental health sometimes may contribute to that lower rate of infantcide.”

Sleep stickers. It’s technology that can detect breathing problems, specifically obstructive sleep apnea. The condition is estimated to affect 30 million people yet 80% are undiagnosed. Local researchers hope to change that statistic without leaving home. A typically sleep study involves electrodes and bulk equipment attached in a lab where patients are monitored overnight. Dr. Steve Xu is an assistant professor at Northwestern and CEO and cofound of Sibel Health. “The ability to sleep comfortably in your natural position we feel is important and really gives us a true sense of how well you are actually sleeping in your home, in your own bed,” he said. “For those that use our system, it’s like wearing two stickers,” he said. “It monitors things like blood oxygenation, but also monitors something called peripheral arterial tonometry. And that signal is very important because it also allows us to determine when you stop breathing at night.” Initially developed for use in the neonatal intensive care unit to monitor babies’ vital signs, Northwestern University researchers grew the system for adults. In a study of 225 participants comparing the system to a standard in-lab evaluation, the stickers had a 90% sensitivity rate.

CDC researchers report that children and teenagers with long COVID have about twice the risk of getting serious outcomes, compared to others without COVID. Heart inflammation; a blood clot in the lung; or a blood clot in the lower leg, thigh, or pelvis were the most common bad outcomes in a new study. “the message that we should take away from this is that we should be very keen on all the methods of prevention for COVID, especially the vaccine” says Stuart Berger, MD, chief of cardiology in the division of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Compared to kids with no history of a COVID-19 diagnosis, the long COVID-19 group was 101% more likely to have a blood clot in the lung, 99% more likely to have heart muscle inflammation, 87% more likely to have a blood clot in a vein, 32% more likely to have acute and unspecified renal failure and 23% were more likely to have type 1 diabetes. Berger continues to express that the long-term effects of long COVID-19 are real, concerning and potentially very serious.

According to a recent study in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, only 2.2% of 2- to 19- year-olds had “optimal” scores on a scoring system that included diet, physical activity and body mass index. And while nearly 57% of 2- to 5-year-olds had high scores, among 11- to 19-year-olds, that fell to 14%. Protecting a child’s heart health can begin with a focus on a mother’s health during or even before pregnancy, said Dr. Amanda Marma Perak, assistant professor of pediatrics and preventive medicine at Northwestern University and senior author of the Circulation study. She recently helped write an update to the scoring system for heart health now known as Life’s Essential 8. It weighs eight contributors to heart health for children and adults: diet, physical activity, nicotine exposure, sleep health, body weight, blood lipids, blood glucose and blood pressure.