Since the early 80s, the 11 centers have been exempt from the “Prospective Payment System,” meaning they are allowed to charge much higher rates for Medicare and Medicaid patients compared to similar centers without being forced to justify that price difference, according to the report in JAMA Internal Medicine. “There does not seem to be a lot of difference between those centers and other high-end National Cancer Institute Cancer Centers,” said study coauthor Dr. Karl Bilimoria, director of the surgical outcomes and quality improvement center at Northwestern Medicine. “We think the system should be critically appraised and reevaluated from time to time and public reporting requirements should be the same across all hospitals.”

The report made Dr. Craig Garfield recall a moment when he was a resident, pushing his 1-year-old in a stroller, with the child in his customary preferred position, his leg bent back. One of his professors — an expert who had recently lectured the residents on child abuse — came up to him and said: “Look, your child is uncomfortable in the stroller. Straighten his leg out.”

“Inside this modern new building, scientists will pioneer discoveries that will impact the practice of medicine and transform human health,” Dr. Eric G. Neilson, vice president for medical affairs and Feinberg’s dean, said in a statement. “Here, we will accelerate the pace of lifesaving medical science that fuels the local and national economy, near world-class campus partners and in a global city with unrivaled opportunities for biomedical commercialization and entrepreneurship.”

Northwestern medical professor Dr. Robert Kushner, whose clinical focus is nutrition and weight management, asks that individuals continue to follow the most recent governmental dietary guidelines for now. The idea that individual responses to a diet vary is an old one, he said, though Spector’s study pushes it further. He gave the example of reducing salt for hypertension; though not everyone will benefit, the guidelines are “recommendations for populations.”

In recent decades, antiretroviral therapy has helped transform the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from a near-certain death sentence into a chronic, manageable disease. As HIV patients are living longer, however, they’re also at higher risk for heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, sudden cardiac death and other diseases than people without HIV, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association published in the journal Circulation. “Even when the virus is controlled such that it is not detectable by routine blood tests, there remains an HIV reservoir in certain tissues of the body which leads to chronic immune system activation and inflammation,” said Matthew Feinstein of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, lead author of the statement.