Media Coverage

AHA expert Kiarri Kershaw called the study a strong and important one. It is “really important for people, clinicians and others to really understand how implicit bias can kind of creep into decision-making, and how it can have an important impact on outcomes,” she said. “The first step is to be aware and acknowledge that you yourself might be biased, and these biases might be influencing you and try and seek ways to address it,” she said.

“It’s very important for those with a diagnosis of diabetes to not get that first heart attack,” said Dr. Neil J. Stone, a cardiologist at Northwestern University. He led development of the 2013 guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association, and he co-authored an update last year.

The discovery was so novel, scientists coined a new term to describe it: mitoautophagy, Northwestern Medicine said in a statement. These self-destructive mitochondria could become the target of drug therapies to fight diseases like ALS. “I think we have found the culprit that primes neurons to become vulnerable to future degeneration: suicidal mitochondria,” senior study author Pembe Hande Ozdinler, associate professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said in the statement. “The mitochondria basically eat themselves up very early in the disease. This occurs selectively in the neurons that will soon degenerate in patient’s brains.”

Still, you need to stay on top of whatever symptoms you do experience because thyroid disease is way, way, more common among women. One in eight women will develop a thyroid disorder during her lifetime, according to the American Thyroid Association, and women are five to eight times more likely than men to have thyroid problems. Even more troubling: 10 to 20 percent of women in their thirties develop thyroid issues, says Eve Feinberg, M.D., assistant professor of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Partnering with Endeleo are groups such as Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the Alzheimer’s Association, the American Heart Association and local medical centers, clinics, colleges and banks. The institute is establishing storefronts offering health information and will install a blood pressure measurement kiosk inside Trinity United Church of Christ. Under the leadership of Rev. Otis Moss III, the church encourages its congregation to explore beyond traditional favorite fried foods and try dishes like baked fish and vegetables.

Dr. Stewart Shankman, a professor and Northwestern Medicine’s chief of psychology in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, said he’s hopeful mental issues someday no longer will be stigmatized but rather viewed like other chronic diseases. “Nobody has to come out that they have diabetes or come out that they have thyroid problems,” Shankman said. “They just take their medicine and move on. But we need to be moving forward by having more awareness.”

The discovery is important, says AIDS researcher Thomas Hope, professor of cell and developmental biology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, because fighting a virus like HIV requires knowing your enemy. “It’s important for us to understand all the strains that are out there, it’s important for us to understand that the (test) we are using will catch this new virus.” Current treatments for HIV, which can reduce viral load and prevent illness, are effective against variants of the HIV virus, including the new subtype, meaning that a new strain is not a new public health crisis.

“It could be the environment, diet, exposure to issues in their life experience,” noted Dr. Clyde Yancy, national spokesperson for the American Heart Association and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University in Chicago. It could also be “something they were exposed to, like violence and trauma,” he noted in a phone interview. The study was not designed to determine how stress might raise hypertension risk and cannot say whether reducing stress would lower that risk, Spruill said.

According to Dr. Hans Breiter, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, we’re a long way from fully understanding what marijuana does to the brain. “Marijuana is a complex plant with at least 104 distinct compounds within it that can have variable psychoactive and neuroactive effects,” said Breiter, whose research focuses on addiction, including the impact of cannabis use. “Psychoactive effects are the main things one would be acutely concerned about for driving, operating heavy machinery or for any type of process that involves complex decision-making and risk benefit analysis of this sort.”

Sad to say so long to the streaming sun and warm summertime air? It only makes sense that we are. Here comes the season of closed windows, more gray skies, and (for some of us) waking up in complete darkness. All of those things are reasons enough to wake up feeling a little less chipper during the winter months than you might feel during the warm days of summer, explains Kevin Most, DO, Chief Medical Officer and a family medicine physician at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital.