Media Coverage

Prenatal depression may be the most severe form of maternal depression

Similar to postpartum depression, prenatal depression is accompanied by feelings of worry, sadness and anxiety…“These women are often juggling a multitude of life stressors, such as pregnancy complications, as well as family and financial stress. In many instances, they struggled with depression or anxiety before they became pregnant,” says Sheehan Fisher, a psychiatry professor and a lead researcher in the study.

Your coffee habit may be genetic

People with a newly identified genetic variant in their DNA, called PDSS2, may be inclined to drink fewer cups of coffee than others, according to a small study…A separate study, published in 2014, linked about a half-dozen other genetic variants in human DNA to the volume and frequency of people’s coffee-drinking behavior.
Although different statistical models were used, the previous research tested a few of the same genetic variations included in the new study. However, an association with coffee consumption was not found, said Marilyn Cornelis, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University who led the 2014 study.

Too Few Female Urologists to Meet Aging Patients’ Demand

“Every day in my practice I hear women say, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. It has taken me a long time to find a woman in this field,’” said study senior author Dr. Sarah Flury. She is an assistant professor of urology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

Your Instagram feed can tell us if you’re depressed, study suggests

Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine examined how three aspects of movement in time and space which they dubbed “circadian movement,” “normalized entropy,” and “location variance” appear to correlate with symptoms of depression. Another study, out of Sweden, found that frequent cellphone use was associated with stress, sleep disturbances, and symptoms of depression among both young adult men and women.

Most antipsychotic drugs not tied to birth defects

Dr. Katherine Wisner, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying the new research, said the amount of data and the methods used make this a “landmark” study.

“For women taking other medications besides risperidone, it is really solid data to show there is no identifiable increased risk of birth defects,” said Wisner, of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

How Periods Might Affect Women’s Athletic Performance

For the past several years, Lynn Rogers, the director of the Neuralplasticity Laboratory at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and her collaborators have been studying the potential impacts of hormonal changes across the menstrual cycle on women’s muscles, other soft tissues and nervous systems. Susceptibility to tissue injuries may be due in part to changing levels of estrogen and progesterone, the two main hormones involved in reproduction, throughout the menstrual cycle. Dr. Rogers, who also is an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and other scientists suspect that these hormones and their fluctuations may subtly alter the efficiency with which the neurons communicate with the muscles, ligaments and other tissues that make the body move.

She wants to make an autonomous wheelchair

How much autonomy would you like with your self-driving car? It’s a conundrum for Silicon Valley and Detroit—but not for Brenna Argall,, a research scientist at Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Argall and her colleagues are working on a smart version of a familiar off-road vehicle: a wheelchair. Backed with $2.5 million in federal grants, they hope to field a commercially feasible model within five years that leaves the user in charge but learns from what it’s told, making control simpler, reaction time faster and collision avoidance easier.

Is cupping safe? What’s behind those red marks on Olympians’ bodies

“When we use heat, it dilates the vessels and improves blood flow to certain areas,” Dr. Melissa Ring, executive director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Northwestern Medicine, told FoxNews.com. “Because of the way cupping works, it accelerates the process and is very localized.” Studies have suggested cupping can help relieve pain when combined with other therapies like acupuncture and spinal manipulation. While there isn’t data on its efficacy for athletic performance, Ring noted it’s commonly used for this purpose.

Zika and the 2016 Olympics: Looking for transparency and not finding it in Rio

To be clear, we are not suggesting that the WHO’s memorandum of understanding is in any way deceptive, or that it compromises the organization’s ability to make the right decisions for public health. But the lack of transparency makes people wonder. If they did not have anything to hide, then why won’t the WHO make the memorandum public? By making people wonder, the WHO puts at risk its ability to play the role of trusted third party in this situation, and perhaps beyond.