Media Coverage

A team of researchers from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago found that the taste preferences for bitter or sweet beverages aren’t based on variations in taste genes, but rather in genes that are involved with emotional responses. The results of the study are published in the journal Human Molecular Genetics. “The genetics underlying our preferences are related to the psychoactive components of these drinks,” said Marilyn Cornelis, co-author of the study and assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “People like the way coffee and alcohol make them feel. That’s why they drink it. It’s not the taste.”

A 2017 report in the journal Circulation spelled out many additional possible influences, ranging from cultural attitudes toward exercise; the unhealthy parts of the traditional Southern diet, which is high in added fats, sugars and sodium; and the health issues that come from stress and perceived discrimination. Black Americans are also more likely to live in poverty, statistics show. And that’s another factor, said Dr. Clyde Yancy, a professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University. “In the diet that people eat, which is all they can afford — one especially represented by fast foods and high sodium intake — the risk of high blood pressure is exaggerated and the onset is much earlier in life,” Yancy said.

Still, the disease itself didn’t come out of the blue. The evidence has been building for years, including reports of patients who didn’t quite fit the mold for known types of dementia such as Alzheimer’s. “There isn’t going to be one single disease that is causing all forms of dementia,” said Sandra Weintraub, a professor of psychiatry, behavioral sciences and neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. She was not involved in the new paper. Weintraub said researchers have been well aware of the “heterogeneity of dementia,” but figuring out precisely why each type can look so different has been a challenge.

By installing 16 pods, Northwestern Memorial officials say, the hospital has been able to more than double its ER’s capacity, and reduce waiting times and crowding in the process. Michael Schmidt, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, says that patients with less-acute problems can be tended to in the chairs, as opposed to patients with more serious problems who need beds. This helps give pods their smaller footprint—an orientation more vertical than horizontal.

With a dramatic increase in demand for services from baby boomers dealing with vision loss, doctors say early intervention and better insurance reimbursement are imperative. Dr. Amani Fawzi, MD, a professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, offered up the following advice to baby boomers dealing with vision loss-related conditions that some experts say will reach epidemic levels by 2050.

“In this study, we knew what participants were trying [to] say since they could talk, however we will need to adapt our algorithms to work with people who cannot talk,” Chartier said. Marc Slutzky, a neurologist at Northwestern University, told Nature magazine that the study is “a really important step.” But “there’s still a long way to go before synthesized speech is easily intelligible,” he said.

They found that the algorithm was more effective at picking up the murmurs than five pediatric cardiologists who listened to the sounds, when compared against echocardiogram results, according to an abstract of a study presented at an American Heart Association conference in 2018. In March, the company started a clinical trial with Northwestern Medicine Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute to test the heart-murmur algorithm on 800 patients, who will also be screened with an echocardiogram. “It’s one thing to listen with a digital stethoscope. Then you need a whole lot of separate training anyway to see what those squiggles read,” said Patrick McCarthy, executive director at the institute.

Then a report in JAMA of a very thorough long-term analysis involving nearly 30,000 men and women initially free of cardiovascular disease suggested otherwise. The researchers, headed by Victor W. Zhong of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, found that eating as little as one-half an egg a day could increase a person’s risk of heart disease, stroke and premature death. “My study showed a dose-response relationship,” Dr. Zhong, a nutrition epidemiologist, told me. “The higher the consumption of eggs, the greater the risk. Those who consumed less than one egg a week had no increased risk.”

Teens were the most likely to make mistakes in inhaler technique and to skip use of a spacer, according to the study published April 17 in the Journal of Hospital Medicine. “We know that asthma can be well-managed in the majority of patients and using your inhaler correctly is key factor to managing asthma,” said lead author Dr. Waheeda Samady, a hospitalist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “Improper inhaler technique can contribute to children having uncontrolled asthma and needing to come to the hospital for their asthma,” Samady said in a hospital news release.

“As a child psychologist, I’m usually talking to adolescent patients about contraception to prevent unwanted pregnancies, not, ‘Down the line, do you want to be a parent? And if so, how important to you is a genetic connection to your child?’,” said Diane Chen. She’s an assistant professor of psychiatry, behavioral sciences and pediatrics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Chen is also first author of a revealing new study examining the considerations that go into that decision.