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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It’s important to take breaks, says Dr. Gaurava Agarwal, a psychiatrist and well-being coach with Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the director of physician well-being. We need to make sure “we are resting and calming our brain down because brains aren’t designed to work this hard, this long, chronically,” he says. “And so taking that five minutes in an hour or one day a week to your ability to recuperate is going to be a big part of dealing with that exhaustion.”
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“What I tell my patients is, ‘I really don’t know which is going to be better. Why don’t you just try them out to see which is relaxing for you?’” said Dr. Phyllis Zee, who directs the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Pink noise has become popular because it’s the choice of a number of researchers who are experimenting with improving memory during sleep.
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When someone has had the coronavirus or has received a vaccine to protect against it, the body’s immune system produces antibodies and protective T cells, a white blood cell that helps protect against the disease. Yes, those immune responses are stored throughout the body. But the amount that would be taken during blood donation would not be enough to matter, said Rob Murphy, an infectious-disease expert at Northwestern University.
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For patients with advanced liver disease, that often leaves no options for curative treatment. Some need a liver transplant to survive, but they won’t qualify if they’re still drinking. “Unfortunately, transplantation is finite,” says Dr. Haripriya Maddur, a hepatologist at Northwestern University. “There aren’t enough organs to go around. What it unfortunately means is that many of these young people may not survive, and die very young — in their 20s and 30s. It’s horrific.”
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More adults with diabetes and prediabetes are likely to be identified with this lowered age cutoff, said Dr. Matthew O’Brien, an associate professor of medicine and preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Moreover, the new screening criteria will likely result in more diagnoses of prediabetes and diabetes in Black and Hispanic individuals, he said in an email. A 2016 Northwestern University study, set in federally funded community health centers, found that 6.3 percent of white patients, 40 and younger, developed diabetes within three years, he said. The proportion of Black patients, 40 and younger, who developed diabetes during this same time period was 11.1 percent, and 17.6 percent among Hispanic patients.
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Washington Post, 3/15
Benjamin D. Singer, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said “vaccination provides better and more durable immunity than natural infection.” He pointed to research findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine this year.
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Dr. Clyde Yancy, a professor of medicine and the chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, published an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association after reviewing the Frankfurt study. More research would be needed to confirm the findings, he wrote, but the results were worrisome.
“These data suggest, preliminarily so, that in people who have been infected in COVID-19, even when cardiac involvement isn’t clear at the outset, there is a relatively high likelihood that there may be cardiac involvement weeks to months afterwards,” Yancy said. “If so, that means we have to deal with that whole scenario very carefully, because if it’s true myocarditis, that exposes a risk — short term for irregular heart rhythms and long term for heart weakening.”
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Experts also worry about unchecked spread of mutated versions of the coronavirus that spread easier and could blunt the effectiveness of certain treatments or vaccines. “It’s still a race against time,” said Jaline Gerardin, who studies COVID-19 trends at Northwestern University. “The fear is we won’t catch something when we should.”
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When workers are stationed in different time zones and there can’t be a consistent dialogue, Slack messaging can lead to higher productivity, says Jennie Lin, an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University. She authored a 2020 paper about how collaboration tools affect productivity in the medical field.
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The average number of people dying of opioid overdoses in the Illinois county that’s home to Chicago increased by more than 20% last year while state residents were told to stay at home to curb the spread of COVID-19, according to a new analysis. The study’s lead author, Maryann Mason – an associate professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern and principal investigator for the Statewide Unintentional Drug Overdose Reporting System in Illinois – says she believes the findings may be applicable beyond just Cook County, given these widespread factors.