Media Coverage

What’s particularly striking about the findings is that the “data set in question is one that reflects the ideal care model,” said Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. “And after controlling for as many things as you can there is still this nagging difference that unfortunately tracks to the race of the patient.” The new research means that all of us “finally have to acknowledge the perverse influence of subconscious bias,” said Yancy. “We should be aware of this and institute strategies that allow us to acknowledge this is operative in decision making and see ways to overcome it.”

Northwestern Medicine, search firm Heidrick & Struggles, nonprofit Women’s Business Development Center, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and architecture firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill were among the 12 firms that hired interns last summer. The architecture firm’s two interns, both of whom were about to start college, worked in its sustainable engineering studio, where they learned CAD drawing and researched new technology, says Ali Irani, a sustainable engineer at the firm. “They were extremely helpful,” Irani says, particularly with research projects. Irani says it was good to work with younger students—the firm’s typical interns are further along in their college careers—and that the program will help build a pipeline of diverse employees.

While more people used telemedicine in states with laws requiring insurance coverage for these visits, the study wasn’t designed to prove whether or how state laws might directly impact adoption of telemedicine. It’s also possible that the study underestimated how many people used telemedicine for care because it only counted visits covered by insurance, said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, a researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who wasn’t involved in the study.

For the surviving spouse, that could mean an increased risk for heart disease and cancer, though the study did not prove a cause-and-effect link. “We think these individuals are more vulnerable to the negative effects of poor sleep,” said corresponding author Diana Chirinos. She’s a research assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The study included 101 people, average age 67. Half had recently lost a spouse, while the other half were married or single.

Even so, the findings confirm what’s been seen in many previous studies examining patient satisfaction and outcomes from surgery as well as from other types of treatment, said Dr. Karl Bilimoria, vice president for quality at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “Patient experience is not a reflection of patient complications or other typical measures of healthcare quality,” Bilimoria, who wasn’t involved in the current study, said by email.

Murad Alam, vice chair and professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, decided to test such claims with a small clinical trial and study. Dr. Alam, in cooperation with Gary Sikorski, founder of Happy Face Yoga, an online and in-person facial-yoga instruction provider based in Providence, R.I., enrolled 27 women ages 40 to 65 to take part in the trial. The mean age of the participants was 53 years old. The women, who were all from the Chicago area and enrolled after seeing an ad for the study, were asked to attend two online 90-minute training sessions where they learned how to do 32 facial exercises from Mr. Sikorski, a co-author of the study.

Marilyn Cornelis has been thinking about coffee for most of her life. As a child, the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine preventive medicine professor watched her father down cup after cup — “a couple of pots a day” and made a game of daring her siblings to lick the spoon he used to stir it. “It was so bitter to us,” she says, her voice still registering a little of the face-twisting shock. That reaction to bitter tastes is universal, and it’s coded into our DNA — at a time when human beings needed to constantly seek food to sustain life,

Study co-author Dr. Ruchi Gupta pointed out that confusion exists over what a real milk allergy looks like. She is a professor of pediatrics and medicine at Northwestern Medicine, in Chicago. “A child may have a milk intolerance that his parents mistake for a milk allergy,” Gupta said. “It’s important that any child suspected of having a milk allergy have the allergy confirmed with an allergist.” A food allergy of any kind can have a big effect on a household, including food costs and quality of life, she noted. “A child with a milk allergy should receive counseling on how to avoid milk, but also on what it means to unnecessarily cut out foods. You don’t want to get rid of necessary nutrients,” Gupta said.

How to explain these results? Marylin Cornelis, assistant professor of preventative medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and one of the study authors says people may “learn to associate that bitter taste with the stimulation that coffee can provide.” In other words, they get hooked on the buzz. Although taste does play some role in people’s coffee consumption, Cornelis says people’s ability to break down caffeine and flush it from the body is a better predictor of how much they’ll drink.

But their study of more than 400,000 people in the United Kingdom found that the more sensitive people are to the bitter taste of caffeine, the more coffee they drink. The sensitivity is caused by a genetic variant. “You’d expect that people who are particularly sensitive to the bitter taste of caffeine would drink less coffee,” said study author Marilyn Cornelis, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. But people with an increased sensitivity to the bitterness of coffee/caffeine have learned to associate “good things with it” — which would be the stimulation provided by caffeine, Cornelis said in a university news release.