Media Coverage

While the U.S. population under 65 is growing much more slowly, more of them have risk factors for heart failure, said Sadiya Khan, a cardiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She isn’t connected with the latest research and has studied heart failure in middle-aged cohorts. Young African-Americans have the highest rates of death from heart failure among people under 65, her research has showed.

You don’t have to be overweight or obese to get type 2 diabetes. In fact, you can have high blood sugar even if you look thin. Around 10% to 15% of people with type 2 diabetes are at a healthy weight. It’s called lean diabetes. It may be a kind of “hybrid” of type 1 and type 2, says Mercedes Carnethon, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University. That means you may not make enough insulin or respond to it very well.

To explain that, let’s first define what your metabolism actually is. When we say “metabolism,” we’re actually referring to metabolic rate, which is the way your body turns what you eat and drink into usable energy, and how it stores that energy so you can use it later on. Your metabolic rate is tied to your body composition and muscle mass, said Elizabeth Lowden, MD, bariatric endocrinologist at the Northwestern Medicine Metabolic Health and Surgical Weight Loss Center at Delnor Hospital. Specifically, you can boost your metabolism by increasing your muscle mass and lowering your body fat.

“Caffeine is one of the most widely consumed psychostimulants in the world … and it does have an addictive property,” said Dr. Marilyn Cornelis, an assistant professor of preventative medicine at Northwestern University. “[With soda], we’re getting the sugar high combined with caffeine, and that is quite a good feeling that might cause you to consume more the next day or another time.” When consumed regularly, people often start to rely on caffeine to increase attentiveness, alertness and energy, according to Msora-Kasago. “They may feel dependent upon it and even experience signs of withdrawal, such as headaches and poor concentration, when they do not have it,” she said.

Fall is apple-picking season, and it’s also a great time to incorporate the fruit into a salad, says Patricia P. Araujo, a clinical dietitian with Northwestern Medicine Digestive Health Center in Chicago. Apple slices can complement a salad that’s built on a bed of spinach with gouda, walnuts, cranberries and brie cheese, for example. The crispness of an apple provides a pleasant texture to a fall salad, without adding many calories. One medium-size apple has about 95 calories, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Apples also provide vitamin C, some B vitamins, minerals and fiber.

With medical advances and competing devices over the past few decades, “the old stethoscope is kind of falling on hard times in terms of rigorous training,” said Dr. James Thomas, a cardiologist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “Some recent studies have shown that graduates in internal medicine and emergency medicine may miss as many of half of murmurs using a stethoscope.” Northwestern is involved in testing new technology created by Eko, a Berkeley, California-based maker of smart stethoscopes. To improve detection of heart murmurs, Eko is developing artificial intelligence algorithms for its devices, using recordings of thousands of heartbeats.

But once the creepy decorations are put away, some frightening health facts can haunt us year-round – and should prompt us to take action. “There’s been a lot of thought about how you motivate people to change,” said Mercedes Carnethon, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “Sometimes scare tactics do work, like the anti-tobacco ads that showed the person smoking through a hole in her neck.”

The technology is owned by COUR Pharmaceutical Development Company, which was co-founded by one of the scientists who developed the treatment, Dr. Stephen Miller of Northwestern University. At the conclusion of the trial, Japanese pharmaceutical company Takeda bought the license for the technology’s use in treating celiac disease, in a deal worth up to $420 million. COUR retains rights to the tech for use in the possible treatment of other diseases. “This is the first demonstration the technology works in patients,” said Miller in a Tuesday press release.

“This is a nice start to hopefully more longitudinal studies with more participants, if able in the future,” said Dr. Maria Rahmandar, pediatrician and medical director of the Substance Use & Prevention Program at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, who was not involved in the new study. “Really all we currently know is that the FDA calls propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin safe for ingestion or putting on skin. These have not been deemed safe to inhale,” Rahmandar said.

“A silent heart attack is not always so silent, but its symptoms — mild chest discomfort, heartburn, nausea, shortness of breath — happen to lots of people and are typically attributed to other causes and not brought to medical attention,” Dr. Robert O. Bonow, a cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told me. Women, whose symptoms are often vague, are especially unlikely to realize they are having a heart attack.