Jaline Gerardin, an assistant professor at Northwestern University who models COVID-19 data for Illinois public health officials, is keeping a close eye on whether Illinois could have another bump in COVID-19 cases. “Intervention fatigue is a real thing,” Gerardin said. “If there is an increase in transmission, are we going to detect it quickly, or are we going to only notice it once there’s already kind of substantial transmission and more hospitalizations and deaths happening?”

Lead study author, Eileen Graham of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, says they found some people with cognitive resilience. They functioned well in life, but autopsy showed a diseased brain. They found some with the opposite: people who functioned poorly in life but whose autopsy showed very little neuro-degeneration.

When detected cases result in reduced cardiac function, about half the time the heart returns to normal on its own, even if scarring remains, according to Clyde Yancy, chief of the division of cardiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and deputy editor of JAMA Cardiology. When it comes to cases caused by Covid, he says, “the hope is that it resolves spontaneously, which happens in many other circumstances where a virus has affected the heart.”

The new study adds to the list of supplement categories that have been shown to contain actual drugs, said Dr. Melinda Ring, executive director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Earlier studies turned up three categories of supplements — those for sex enhancement, body building and weight loss — that were most likely to be contaminated by actual drugs, she said.

While the data points negatively toward the overall Hispanic population, Dr. Sadiya Sana Khan, a cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, cautions that future research also needs to take into account subgroups within that population.

Crain’s list of Chicago’s largest hospitals returns with the top five hospitals in the same positions as last year, while the hospital systems list retains its same top three rankings from the prior year.

“These discoveries suggest the importance of considering sex as a biological variable in human genetics and genomics studies,” said project leader Barbara Stranger, an associate professor of pharmacology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The researchers analyzed 44 types of healthy human tissue from 838 people to find out if there were differences between women and men in the average amount of gene expression.

As part of a new study to show how music can heal the brain, Clara Takarabe plays her viola virtually for patients who have suffered brain injury or stroke at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.