Media Coverage

[VIDEO] It’s been years in the making – and not all of it was smooth sailing. But Northwestern University is officially opening its massive $560 million, state of the art research center next week – and “Chicago Tonight” got a sneak peek.

Gabriel’s experience with postpartum depression and anxiety is more common than people think. About 10 percent of dads experience postpartum depression. “The estimate is higher than depression in the normal population,” said Sheehan D. Fisher, an assistant professor in the psychiatry and behavior sciences department at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “A father’s depression has a direct link to the child. It definitely impacts the whole family’s health.”

Fiddling with your phone in bed, after all, is bad sleep hygiene. And for some, worrying about sleep goals can make bedtime anxiety even worse. There’s a name for an unhealthy obsession with achieving perfect sleep: orthosomnia. It was coined by researchers from Rush University Medical School and Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in a 2017 case study published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine. Dr. Kelly Baron, one of the paper’s authors and the director of the University of Utah’s behavioral sleep medicine program, said that sleep trackers can be helpful in identifying patterns.

“Inside this modern new building, scientists will pioneer discoveries that will impact the practice of medicine and transform human health,” Dr. Eric G. Neilson, vice president for medical affairs and Feinberg’s dean, said in a statement. “Here, we will accelerate the pace of lifesaving medical science that fuels the local and national economy, near world-class campus partners and in a global city with unrivaled opportunities for biomedical commercialization and entrepreneurship.”

Northwestern medical professor Dr. Robert Kushner, whose clinical focus is nutrition and weight management, asks that individuals continue to follow the most recent governmental dietary guidelines for now. The idea that individual responses to a diet vary is an old one, he said, though Spector’s study pushes it further. He gave the example of reducing salt for hypertension; though not everyone will benefit, the guidelines are “recommendations for populations.”

In recent decades, antiretroviral therapy has helped transform the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from a near-certain death sentence into a chronic, manageable disease. As HIV patients are living longer, however, they’re also at higher risk for heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, sudden cardiac death and other diseases than people without HIV, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association published in the journal Circulation. “Even when the virus is controlled such that it is not detectable by routine blood tests, there remains an HIV reservoir in certain tissues of the body which leads to chronic immune system activation and inflammation,” said Matthew Feinstein of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, lead author of the statement.

In recent decades, antiretroviral therapy has helped transform the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) from a near-certain death sentence into a chronic, manageable disease. As HIV patients are living longer, however, they’re also at higher risk for heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, sudden cardiac death and other diseases than people without HIV, according to a new scientific statement from the American Heart Association published in the journal Circulation.“Even when the virus is controlled such that it is not detectable by routine blood tests, there remains an HIV reservoir in certain tissues of the body which leads to chronic immune system activation and inflammation,” said Matthew Feinstein of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, lead author of the statement.

Constipation is common and can be caused by a lack of liquid in the GI tract or a diet insufficient in fiber, says Dr. John Pandolfino, chief of gastroenterology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “For constipation, MiraLAX is our first-line treatment,” he says. “It’s very effective, it’s safe and just a very gentle kind of laxative.” Pandolfino cautions that if you’re also experiencing bloody stools, rectal bleeding or unexplained dramatic changes in bowel habits, you should contact your health care provider. Often, though, bouts of constipation can be managed with OTC products, he says.

An attenuated virus, such as the one used in the varicella vaccine, is a strain that has been engineered to be so weakened that it can’t make you sick when you get the vaccine, said Dr. Tina Tan, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and an infectious disease specialist at the Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital. It’s just similar enough to the regular virus to alert your immune system to make antibodies that can fight the virus in the future, but apparently, in a small number of cases, that weakened form of the virus could to lead to shingles, Tan told NBC News.

“There is no reason to expect that patient experience scores would be associated with the breadth of services they provide,” said Dr. Karl Bilimoria, a researcher at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who wasn’t involved in the study. “In fact, small centers often do well because they are able to offer more individual attention to patients,” Bilimoria said by email. “Simply offering a service doesn’t improve satisfaction; it must delivered well.”