Media Coverage

During the early months of the pandemic, drug and alcohol use increased sharply. In Cook County, the average number of opioid overdose deaths rose nearly 26% during Illinois’ first stay-at-home order in spring 2020, according to a Northwestern Medicine study. About 13% of about 5,400 American adults who responded to a June 2020 survey said they had started or increased substance use to cope with stress or emotions related to COVID-19, according to findings reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s very risky to allow individual school boards to determine mask/social distancing policy on their own without justification,” said Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Also, it’s unknown whether getting a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, on top of Johnson & Johnson, might cause problems, said Dr. Michael Angarone, an associate professor in the department of medicine and division of infectious diseases at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“While this was impressive, there still is substantial room for improvement in terms of the accuracy of single-word decoding and sentence decoding,” said Marc W. Slutzky, a professor of neurology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Another major step forward would be fully implantable devices that communicate with decoding devices wirelessly, he said.

If you do want to nap during the day, make sure to do it in the morning or early afternoon, and keep it short, no longer than 30 minutes. “The closer you are to bedtime or the longer the nap is, the more likely you are to run into trouble,” said <a href="https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/faculty-profiles/az/profile.html?xid=27412"Dr. Sabra Abbott, an assistant professor of neurology in sleep medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

Summer camp outbreaks “certainly could be a precursor” to what happens when youngsters return to classrooms in the fall, said Dr. Michelle Prickett, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. The outcome will depend on vaccination rates and which virus variants are prevalent, she said. “We just need to be vigilant,” Prickett said.

Researchers with Northwestern University published findings in the Nutrients journal, stemming from an analysis of nearly 40,000 participants in the U.K. Biobank. The team studied participants’ dietary habits in 2006-2010 and hypothesized the subsequent risk of coronavirus infection in 2020. Researchers specifically looked at participants’ consumption of coffee, tea, processed meat, red meat, fruit, vegetables and oily fish.

A drop in hypocretin is part of narcolepsy with cataplexy, where strong emotions, especially laughter or surprise, trigger a sudden loss of muscle tone. In movies, characters with cataplexy suddenly go limp, fall over, and hit the ground. In reality, the symptom isn’t usually that dramatic, says Michael Awad, MD, chief of the Division of Sleep Surgery at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago and chief medical officer of PEAK Sleep.

“Right now, they are still very rare,” Dr. Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo, a COVID-19 scientist and researcher at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said of breakthrough infections. Even with the new delta variants, the protection rate offered by vaccines continues to be high, he said.

This study took place before the advent of the Delta variant, which is 50 to 80 times more transmissible than the original Alpha strain of COVID-19, noted Dr. Tina Tan, a professor specializing in pediatric infectious diseases at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago.