Media Coverage

The goal of the study, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, was to determine whether there was a minimum amount of activity older adults could enjoy to see some health benefits. “Even though it’s well known physical activity can help prevent disability, for many people, they’re just inactive, and it’s daunting to get started,” said Dorothy Dunlop, lead author of the study and professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in an interview with USA TODAY.

In fact, among kids under age 12, a greater percentage of concussions occur during play — like riding bikes or running around playgrounds — than during organized sports, said Dr. Cynthia LaBella. LaBella, who wrote an editorial published with the study, is medical director of the Institute for Sports Medicine at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. She said it’s important for parents to be aware of signs and symptoms of concussion and when to seek medical help. But they should also keep the risk of sports-related concussions in perspective, she added.

Less than 10 minutes a day of brisk walking can help prevent disability in people with arthritis pain in their knee, hip, ankle or foot, researchers report. Just one hour a week of brisk physical activity “is less than 10 minutes a day for people to maintain their independence. It’s very doable,” said lead study author Dorothy Dunlop. She’s a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “This minimum threshold may motivate inactive older adults to begin their path toward a physically active lifestyle with the wide range of health benefits promoted by physical activity,” Dunlop added in a university news release.

Mumps and pertussis (whooping cough) have been on the rise in recent years, and the previously devastating tuberculosis is still causing trouble, though not at the rate it once did. “Recently, we’ve been seeing an uptick in a whole different variety of infectious diseases, and that includes diseases we previously thought we had beat. Measles is probably the No. 1 example,’’ said Judd Hultquist, assistant professor of infectious diseases at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

The new study “really does raise our attention yet again that there is an inescapable association between influenza and heart failure,” said Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “That is an awareness that should not be overlooked, because the older population is particularly vulnerable to influenza.” There are a couple of potential ways that flu might increase risk of heart failure, said study co-author Dr. Scott Solomon, a professor with Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

There are an “amazing amount of gaps” in our knowledge of sleep, said Paula Williams, a clinical health psychologist who studies sleep at the University of Utah. In the meantime, many of us are pushing our luck. Kristen Knutson, a biomedical anthropologist at the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said about 30 percent of adult Americans now qualify as short sleepers, compared with about 20 percent in the 1970s. She thinks longer commuting times are likely a factor as well as extra time spent on computers and smartphones, distractions that didn’t exist 50 years ago.

We need to start by getting the terminology straight. There are food allergies and food sensitivities, both of which can be referred to as food intolerances. Ruchi Gupta, M.D., lead author of the new research study, says that many people talk about allergies and sensitivities interchangeably, when in fact they represent “very different conditions that often require different strategies for day-to-day management.”

NORTHWESTERN MEDICINE STUDY SHOWS EFFICACY OF VALVE REPLACEMENT SURGERY: A study co-authored by a Northwestern cardiac surgeon could lead to a dramatic shift in open-heart surgeries for one condition. Patients at low risk for surgical complications benefited from a minimally invasive transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), versus open-heart surgery, according to a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored by Dr. S. Chris Malaisrie.

“Typically, if this is left untreated, usually this is fatal. Usually within the first year of life,” pediatric cardiologist Michael Perez said of Eloise’s condition.[…]”Three weeks after she was born, she was going to have this [open-heart] surgery … so that was terrifying,” Eloise’s mother Krista Hoffman said. But the surgery went off without a hitch at Lurie Children’s at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, and her parents couldn’t be more proud of their resilient little daughter, who just happens to have a small piece of Gore-Tex in her heart now.

Earlier this year, the AHA published a statistical update showing that nearly half of US adults have some form of cardiovascular disease. The increased risk was mostly attributed to high blood pressure. “We follow a dictum in medicine of ‘do no harm’ and aspirin is not benign,” said Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital, in Chicago. “Understanding how best to use aspirin, or any other medication, is the kind of refinement that enables our best health.”