Scientists at Northwestern University outside Chicago have discovered why these conditions develop in the nascent brain, raising hopes that better treatment for them can be found. “We have solved an important piece of the puzzle in understanding how this mutation causes intellectual disabilities and mental illness,” said Peter Penzes, director of the Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment at Northwestern’s medical school and lead author of a paper on the subject that will be published Thursday in the journal Neuron.

Dr. Joshua Hauser approached the bedside of his patient, treatment in hand. But it wasn’t medicine he carried. It was a copy of a 19th-century poem titled “Invictus.”

Based on these findings, heart doctors will be thinking long and hard about adding colchicine to the drug cocktail prescribed to heart attack patients, said Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Rogers and his team at Northwestern report a new wireless and battery-free smart skin that could shift the course of this technology. Through a fast, programmable array of miniature vibrating disks embedded in a soft, flexible material, this smart skin can contour to the body and deliver sensory input — what you’d feel when using it — that Rogers says is quite natural.

Dr. Jeremiah Stamler is considered the father of preventive cardiology. He’s been a professor at Northwestern Medicine since 1959. “The current policy of the American Heart Association talks about achieving healthy lifestyle across the board,” said Dr. Philip Greenland, a longtime colleague of Stamler’s. “Healthy exercise, healthy weight, healthy diet, nonsmoking and prevention of diabetes.” And all of those recommendations, says Greenland, stem from Stamler’s research.

“Our study shows black and Hispanic women experience disparities in pain management in the postpartum setting,” said study leader Dr. Nevert Badreldin from Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “These disparities cannot be explained by less perceived pain,” Badreldin said in a statement. Just 4.2% of white women reported pain scores of 5 or higher, compared with 7.7% of Hispanic women and 11.8% of black women, researchers report in Obstetrics & Gynecology.

AHA expert Kiarri Kershaw called the study a strong and important one. It is “really important for people, clinicians and others to really understand how implicit bias can kind of creep into decision-making, and how it can have an important impact on outcomes,” she said. “The first step is to be aware and acknowledge that you yourself might be biased, and these biases might be influencing you and try and seek ways to address it,” she said.

“It’s very important for those with a diagnosis of diabetes to not get that first heart attack,” said Dr. Neil J. Stone, a cardiologist at Northwestern University. He led development of the 2013 guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association, and he co-authored an update last year.

The discovery was so novel, scientists coined a new term to describe it: mitoautophagy, Northwestern Medicine said in a statement. These self-destructive mitochondria could become the target of drug therapies to fight diseases like ALS. “I think we have found the culprit that primes neurons to become vulnerable to future degeneration: suicidal mitochondria,” senior study author Pembe Hande Ozdinler, associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in the statement. “The mitochondria basically eat themselves up very early in the disease. This occurs selectively in the neurons that will soon degenerate in patient’s brains.”