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CuddleCot donations provide “a way for families to do something good out of the tragedy that happened to them,” said Dr. Tracy Arghavani, obstetrician-gynecologist at Northwestern Medicine Huntley Hospital. Mrs. Fricker said some 400 to 500 hospitals in this country have CuddleCots available, “most donated by families like ours.” And last August, St. Peter’s Hospital in Albany received a Cuddle Cot donated by Kristin McVeigh-Parente, president, and David Parente, vice president, of the McVeigh Funeral Home in Albany after they were told of the need by the March of Dimes.

While some of these women may eventually have two or more babies, others may hit a fertility wall, said Dr. Helen Kim, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “I think as women delay childbearing they may not realize that fertility declines with age and that there are limits to what fertility treatments can do for them,” Kim told NBC News on Wednesday. Although there are reports of increased birth rates among older women, “that may not be enough to make up for the decline” in births among younger women.

Michael Ison, MD, a professor of infectious diseases and organ transplantation at Northwestern University in Chicago, says regardless of the cause, treatment is similar. “What influenza-like illness is saying to us is that you have a virus likely affecting your respiratory system that is making you feel crummy and, currently aside from influenza, there aren’t good therapies for these other viruses, so we just treat the symptoms,” he says. An flu-like illness diagnosis can also mean your doctor thinks you have the flu but doesn’t see the point in doing an official flu test.

While there’s no question that food allergies are real — and for some, potentially life-threatening — people who self-diagnose as food allergic without consulting a medical professional may be misinterpreting their symptoms as an allergic reaction, the study authors wrote. In those cases, what the individuals were experiencing could be a sign of food intolerance” or other food related conditions” rather than a true allergic response, lead study author Dr. Ruchi Gupta, a pediatrician and professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Illinois, said in a statement.

Which means both that food allergies are extremely common — and that millions of Americans who think they’ve got one are probably wrong. Researchers from Northwestern University surveyed more than 40,000 adults between the fall of 2015 and the fall of 2016, asking them whether they had a food allergy of some kind. They also asked questions about what kind of reactions they’d experienced that led them to believe they were allergic to a food or foods.

The institute is partly funded by a $10 million gift from the Polsky family. Michael Polsky is founder and CEO of Invenergy, and Tanya Polsky, his wife, is a philanthropist and former finance executive. “I think it will be game-changing for patients,” said Dr. Edward Schaeffer, chairman of the department of urology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “They can come to one facility, one physical location, and see all their care providers, get treated from A to Z, start to finish.” The institute also will help physicians and researchers better collaborate in order to fuel innovation, Schaeffer said.

The Polsky Urologic Cancer Institute at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Streeterville, which opens today, treats patients with urologic cancers, including prostate, bladder, kidney and testicular cancer. The aim is to “provide comprehensive, bottom-to-top care for our patients—before their diagnosis, during their treatment and after care,” said Northwestern Memorial Urology Chair Dr. Edward Schaeffer. Behind the scenes, the gift will be used to expand the program’s research efforts and create novel treatments. “I’m not really a typical philanthropist who just sort of spreads money around,” said Polsky, the founder and CEO of Invenergy. “I like to consider myself an investor in solutions, where whatever I provide sort of relates to me in some way and also can make a lot of difference.”

Research published Friday in the medical journal JAMA shows over 10% of US adults like Sorensen have at least one food allergy: about 26 million people.
“We often think of allergies as a childhood condition, and we see so many of our children, our young children, developing food allergies,” said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, one of the authors of the study. As the research shows, the problem also affects the adult population. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 4% and 6% of American children are affected by food allergies.

Using these criteria, the researchers estimated that 10.8 percent of American adults — or more than 26 million people — have an allergy to one or more foods. Another 21 million think they have a food allergy but do not. The report is in JAMA Network Open. “With one in five adults having a negative reaction to a food, it is essential to see an allergist for a diagnosis,” said the lead author, Dr. Ruchi S. Gupta, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern. “Food allergies can be life-threatening, but other food-related conditions may be treatable.”

“The main message from the survey is that one in five adults have some kind of food related conditions that are causing them to avoid certain foods,” said Dr. Ruchi Gupta of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “And one in 10 has what looks convincingly like a food allergy – and of those, only half are getting a proper diagnosis by a physician.”