Media Coverage

Wearing dirty jeans more than 10 times before washing sounds pretty gross. However, your chances of developing bacterial infections is pretty low, says Dr. Steve Xu, M.D. and instructor in the department of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “The skin is a pretty good barrier against infections,” he tells Men’s Health. Most healthy guys don’t need to worry if they avoid doing laundry.

[Written by Mercedes Carnethon, PhD] When a swim coach challenged my 3-year-old daughter to race against her 5-year old brother, she beat him so badly that it seemed the toddler swim equivalent of the U.S. women’s national soccer team’s 13-0 thrashing of Thailand in their opening game of the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup. My daughter did not worry about embarrassing her brother. She just did her best and won.That is why I cheered alongside millions when the U.S. women’s national soccer team advanced to Sunday’s finals of the 2019 Women’s World Cup after a hard-fought semifinal victory over England. My cheers were not only because the women have the opportunity to bring home their fourth World Cup victory, but also because the lessons in leadership that sports can teach to girls and women were on display to the world.

Dr. Matthew Davis and Seema Shah, both affiliated with Northwestern University, co-authored an editorial that published in JAMA alongside the new study on Tuesday.
“Although the study did not measure actual outbreaks of disease, reductions in children’s risk of contracting measles are a promising outcome in California resulting from policy changes,” Davis and Shah wrote in the editorial.

“The reason increased variability has a detrimental effect on metabolic heath may have to do with our biological clocks,” said Kristen Knutson, a researcher at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who wasn’t involved in the study. “We have internal 24-hour rhythms of many processes that impact metabolism and for optimal function these rhythms should be synchronized with each other and with the environment,” Knutson said by email. “If we are sleeping at different times and different amounts, our internal clocks may have difficulty staying synchronized, which may impair function.”

She paused, at a loss of words, then said of the Goralskis: “I don’t know. It’s unbelievable. I just — I hope they know how special they are.” There were hugs and thank-you’s, and Bethany and her kidney recipient Melanie Mavec, 37, a Plainfield middle-school teacher, gleefully compared 3-inch scars from their surgeries. One donor teared up during the prepared remarks, but — as a reporter noted with some surprise during the question-and-answer session — only one. “They’re a hardy bunch,” quipped Dr. John Friedewald, medical director of kidney and pancreas transplantation at Northwestern Medicine.

The sisters stuck together. Their surgeries were performed a day apart in March and that set off a chain reaction. Ten donors and recipients met for the first time this week at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

“Given that we found strong associations between certain caregiver features and the likelihood of abuse, it is vitally important for clinicians evaluating the child to ask about who was present at the time of injury,” said study author Dr. Mary Clyde Pierce. She’s an emergency doctor at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Abuse-related injury was much less likely when a female caregiver was present, with the exception of a female babysitter, the findings showed. The researchers also linked different-than-usual caregiving arrangements with increased risk of abuse.

The Food and Drug Administration issued a policy earlier this year to restrict how and where flavored e-cigarettes are sold, calling underage vaping “an epidemic.” This initiative would hold companies responsible for limiting these sales to separate adult-only sections or stores that bar minors, in addition to tightening age verification and bulk sales online. There is not much research available regarding the long-term effects of e-cigarette use. In June, the American Lung Association received a nearly $25 million federal grant to research the lung health of millennials, in partnership with Northwestern Medicine scientists.

Patients who are taking an ARB should contact their pharmacist and physician to determine whether the medications they are taking are on the list, said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a cardiologist and an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The FDA has compiled a list of contaminated batches that have been recalled. In addition to losartan, two other ARBs have also been affected, valsartan and irbesartan. But Khan suggests people also check with their doctors. “It can be confusing because there are a lot of different formulations of these medications out there and knowing if your medication is on the list is not clear-cut,” she said.

At the same time, positive experiences during adolescence can have a lasting positive impact on the direction people’s lives take later on, particularly when they learn how to form healthy relationships with other people and make healthy choices about things like sex and drug use. “Many behaviors we have as adults began when we were adolescents – we call this “tracking” of health behaviors,” said Mercedes Carnethon, vice chair of the department of preventive medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.