Media Coverage
The work done by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine faculty members (and even some students) is regularly highlighted in newspapers, online media outlets and more. Below you’ll find links to articles and videos of Feinberg in the news.
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HealthDay
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AHA News: Living Near Convenience Stores Could Raise Risk of Artery-Clogging Condition
After adjusting for various factors, researchers discovered participants had a 34 percent increase in the likelihood of developing atherosclerosis with each 10 percent increase in nearby convenience stores. “This supports the notion that place matters,” said Kiarri Kershaw, the study’s senior author. “An increase in convenience stores may make unhealthy eating options more readily accessible. It may also be a marker for a larger set of changes occurring in a neighborhood that could influence health, like a decline in wealth or economic investment.”
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The Washington Post
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Is KonMari a fad? I can say this: It tamed my anxiety as much as my stuff.
Why? When our environment is unkempt, anxiety can bleed into other parts of our lives, making us feel badly about ourselves. Researchers have known for years that being around clutter can raise stress levels, especially among women — who can find it difficult to manage and organize their family’s possessions. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said a disorganized environment is a constant visual reminder of things left undone. It can make people feel “like they’re overwhelmed, and their life is out of control and in chaos.” On the flip side, studies show that women who see their homes as restorative feel less depressed throughout the day. Having order and simplicity in your space can free up your mind.
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Chicago Tribune
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How Marie Kondo’s tidying method tamed one woman’s anxiety
Why? When our environment is unkempt, anxiety can bleed into other parts of our lives, making us feel badly about ourselves. Researchers have known for years that being around clutter can raise stress levels, especially among women – who can find it difficult to manage and organize their family’s possessions. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said a disorganized environment is a constant visual reminder of things left undone. It can make people feel “like they’re overwhelmed, and their life is out of control and in chaos.”
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Lurie to open intermediate-care unit
Lurie Children’s Hospital is opening a 20-bed ward for patients who are too sick for general inpatient care but don’t need an intensive-care unit. The intermediate-care unit is set to open Feb. 22 at the Streeterville hospital. It will have a staff of about 75, and the average length of stay for patients will be 36 to 72 hours, compared with 24 to 36 hours on Lurie’s general inpatient floors. Intermediate-care units, also called step-down and transitional-care units, have been around for decades, but hospitals use the model in a variety of ways.
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Kidneys on demand
A team at Northwestern Medicine is developing techniques that could one day create functional kidneys in their Streeterville lab, says Dr. Jason Wertheim, a transplant surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and vice chair for research in the department of surgery at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Funded partly by a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the researchers use chemicals to strip animals’ cells from their organs, leaving behind only scaffolds—”the structural building blocks of organs,” Wertheim said. It’s expensive work, which is why the team is currently using tiny rat kidneys that require fewer of the costly nutrients needed for cells to grow.
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The New York Times
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Why Do South Asians Have Such High Rates of Heart Disease?
Dr. Namratha Kandula, a Masala investigator at Northwestern, said she hopes to study the children of the Masala participants next because they tend to influence their parents’ health and lifestyle habits, and the researchers want to understand whether health risks in second-generation South Asians are similar or not. But for now, some experts say their goal is to increase outreach to South Asians who may be at high risk and neglecting their health.
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The New York Times
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Depression During and After Pregnancy Can Be Prevented, National Panel Says. Here’s How.
Even in some cases in which it doesn’t prevent depression, counseling may be beneficial, said Dr. Melissa Simon, a task force member and vice chairwoman of research at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine’s obstetrics and gynecology department. “It provides the pregnant person with education and coping strategies,” she said, and can help those who develop depression “get referred and embedded into treatment more effectively and efficiently.”
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The New York Times
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What You and Your Family Need to Know About Maternal Depression
Scientists are trying to understand how genes and hormones play a role in perinatal depression, knowledge that could eventually help predict which women might develop it. “We don’t have a good screening tool specifically for identifying people at risk for perinatal depression,” said Dr. Melissa Simon, a panel member who is vice chairwoman of research at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine’s obstetrics and gynecology department. “We need a tool.”
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U.S. News & World Report
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One Key Step Can Help Cancer Patients Quit Smoking
“With the stress cancer patients are under, they tend to be at higher risk of relapsing for a longer period of time. So we thought providing treatment for longer would be more effective,” said study senior author Brian Hitsman. He’s an associate professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago. All of the study participants had concurrent behavioral therapy. Though this therapy wasn’t a focus of the research, Hitsman said that it needs to be studied more closely because it can be a powerful tool to help cancer patients quit smoking. “You can imagine how someone going through a severe or significant disease and treatment process could benefit from the support we provided in this study,” he said in a university news release.
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Chicago Tribune
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No new HIV cases by 2030? Advocates in Chicago applaud Trump goal but question how it will be carried out.
But he also questions if enough funding will be available, given the state’s constant fiscal woes. Brian Mustanski, director of the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said there’s a need for better understanding of how to provide treatment access to young, gay and bisexual men of color, who are disproportionately affected by HIV. In addition to targeting geographic hot spots, he said, prevention efforts also have to focus on “demographic hot spots.”
