Media Coverage

Linda Van Horn, who heads the nutrition division at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, co-authored an editorial published with the study. She agreed that convenience is a powerful force in the national diet, as is advertising. “Access to snacks, desserts, sugary beverages, pizza, sandwiches and other grab-and-go foods is far greater and more highly marketed than fruits, vegetables, whole-grain foods, and unsalted nuts and seeds,” Van Horn said.

Dr. David O’Dell, of Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, said vaping has changed the way physicians work. “As we’re learning more and more particularly about the near term and potential long term dangers of vaping and e-cigarette use, it’s now a question I ask patients routinely,” O’Dell said. Right now, the CDC is calling on people to consider refraining from vaping. But one congressman said Tuesday that was too weak, and that the government should simply say vaping can cause death.

Chiropractic treatment as an option to treat pain is particularly important for pregnant women because there are many pain medications they shouldn’t use because they could adversely affect their baby, says Dr. Heather L. Beall, an OB-GYN with Northwestern Medicine in Crystal Lake, Illinois. “You don’t want (pregnant women) to use chronic pain pills because they’re addictive,” Beall says. Such medications could cause the baby to go into withdrawal when he or she is born. Some non-steroidal pain medications could cause the fetus’s heart valve to close prematurely, which could be life-threatening, she says.

Still, some changes for the better found in the study should help move Americans’ health in the right direction, said Linda Van Horn, author of an editorial accompanying the study and chief of nutrition at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. “Diets that are high in ‘complex’ or naturally occurring dietary carbohydrates are higher dietary quality than ‘refined’ carbohydrates that are processed and depleted of most of the vitamins, minerals and dietary fiber that are inherent in the naturally occurring carbs,” Van Horn said by email.

What they discovered has convinced many that the key to chronic pain is found in the organ that receives the signals, and whose makeup is altered slightly every time an electrical impulse arrives on the neuronal highway. “We said, ‘Why don’t we bring in some patients and look inside their brains?’ ” said A. Vania Apkarian, a professor of physiology, anesthesiology and physical medicine and rehabilitation at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “And as soon as we did that, we found all kinds of differences between healthy pain patients and chronic pain patients.”

Palforzia “would open up the opportunity for all allergists to be able to offer some treatment to their patients that has been protocol-driven and gone through (clinical) trials,” said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who studies food allergies. “It gives them a little more confidence to offer it.” Gupta, who also is a pediatrician at Lurie Children’s Hospital, noted that questions still remain about the drug.

Crain’s list of Chicago’s largest hospitals is joined this year by our newest list, Chicago’s hospital systems, and both show an industry that’s consolidating quickly. In 2018, Amita Health, itself the result of the 2015 merger of Adventist Midwest Health and Ascension’s Alexian Brothers Health System, added Presence Health to its fold, and Centegra joined Northwestern Medicine. Advocate Aurora Health also appears on both lists for the first time; its merger closed in April 2018, and this year’s Advocate Aurora hospitals are last year’s Advocate Health Care’s.

That isn’t to say there have been massive shifts in the rankings. On the hospitals list, Northwestern Memorial trades places with the University of Chicago Medical Center, moving up into the No. 1 spot, but that’s the only change for our top five this year. Even with the second-biggest revenue growth on our chart, Rush University Medical Center held steady at No. 3.

While the new study shows an association between anemia early in pregnancy, “an association is not the same as causation,” said Dr. Nevert Badreldin, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It’s hard to assess, based on this information, whether the anemia is in fact creating the association or whether the higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders are related to something else the women (with anemia early in pregnancy) have in common.” Women should be reassured that the current guidelines recommend screening for anemia at the first prenatal visit, Badreldin said. “So the great majority of women are getting screened early,” she added.

There’s no single definition of a low-carb, high-fat eating regimen, says Bethany M. Doerfler, a clinical research dietitian in the division of gastroenterology and hepatology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. She works in her division’s Digestive Health Center. While there are some well-known eating plans that are low-carb and high-fat – like the keto diet – you need not follow one of those regimens to adhere to this style of eating. You can craft your own low-carb, high-fat eating plan with a registered dietitian. This sort of regimen deviates from the Institute of Medicine’s acceptable macronutrient distribution range, which recommends adults in the U.S. get 45% to 65% of their daily calories from carbs, 20% to 35% from dietary fat and 10% to 35% from protein.

Just to prove my point, I had younger (and dumber) me call George Chiampas, an emergency medicine physician at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “We’ll see various things from bicyclists riding at a slow pace that are struck by a vehicle or a car door that opens up and then they flip over the car door, to bicyclists who are riding at a fast speed along Lake Shore Drive and they either get distracted or try to avoid someone else and they get propelled off their bike,” Chiampas said. “It’s everything from mild injuries to intracranial bleeding, neck injuries and severe facial injuries.”