Media Coverage
The work done by Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine faculty members (and even some students) is regularly highlighted in newspapers, online media outlets and more. Below you’ll find links to articles and videos of Feinberg in the news.
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Chicago Tribune
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How Marie Kondo’s tidying method tamed one woman’s anxiety
Why? When our environment is unkempt, anxiety can bleed into other parts of our lives, making us feel badly about ourselves. Researchers have known for years that being around clutter can raise stress levels, especially among women – who can find it difficult to manage and organize their family’s possessions. Inger Burnett-Zeigler, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said a disorganized environment is a constant visual reminder of things left undone. It can make people feel “like they’re overwhelmed, and their life is out of control and in chaos.”
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Lurie to open intermediate-care unit
Lurie Children’s Hospital is opening a 20-bed ward for patients who are too sick for general inpatient care but don’t need an intensive-care unit. The intermediate-care unit is set to open Feb. 22 at the Streeterville hospital. It will have a staff of about 75, and the average length of stay for patients will be 36 to 72 hours, compared with 24 to 36 hours on Lurie’s general inpatient floors. Intermediate-care units, also called step-down and transitional-care units, have been around for decades, but hospitals use the model in a variety of ways.
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Kidneys on demand
A team at Northwestern Medicine is developing techniques that could one day create functional kidneys in their Streeterville lab, says Dr. Jason Wertheim, a transplant surgeon at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and vice chair for research in the department of surgery at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Funded partly by a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, the researchers use chemicals to strip animals’ cells from their organs, leaving behind only scaffolds—”the structural building blocks of organs,” Wertheim said. It’s expensive work, which is why the team is currently using tiny rat kidneys that require fewer of the costly nutrients needed for cells to grow.
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The New York Times
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Why Do South Asians Have Such High Rates of Heart Disease?
Dr. Namratha Kandula, a Masala investigator at Northwestern, said she hopes to study the children of the Masala participants next because they tend to influence their parents’ health and lifestyle habits, and the researchers want to understand whether health risks in second-generation South Asians are similar or not. But for now, some experts say their goal is to increase outreach to South Asians who may be at high risk and neglecting their health.
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The New York Times
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Depression During and After Pregnancy Can Be Prevented, National Panel Says. Here’s How.
Even in some cases in which it doesn’t prevent depression, counseling may be beneficial, said Dr. Melissa Simon, a task force member and vice chairwoman of research at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine’s obstetrics and gynecology department. “It provides the pregnant person with education and coping strategies,” she said, and can help those who develop depression “get referred and embedded into treatment more effectively and efficiently.”
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The New York Times
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What You and Your Family Need to Know About Maternal Depression
Scientists are trying to understand how genes and hormones play a role in perinatal depression, knowledge that could eventually help predict which women might develop it. “We don’t have a good screening tool specifically for identifying people at risk for perinatal depression,” said Dr. Melissa Simon, a panel member who is vice chairwoman of research at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine’s obstetrics and gynecology department. “We need a tool.”
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U.S. News & World Report
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One Key Step Can Help Cancer Patients Quit Smoking
“With the stress cancer patients are under, they tend to be at higher risk of relapsing for a longer period of time. So we thought providing treatment for longer would be more effective,” said study senior author Brian Hitsman. He’s an associate professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago. All of the study participants had concurrent behavioral therapy. Though this therapy wasn’t a focus of the research, Hitsman said that it needs to be studied more closely because it can be a powerful tool to help cancer patients quit smoking. “You can imagine how someone going through a severe or significant disease and treatment process could benefit from the support we provided in this study,” he said in a university news release.
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Chicago Tribune
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No new HIV cases by 2030? Advocates in Chicago applaud Trump goal but question how it will be carried out.
But he also questions if enough funding will be available, given the state’s constant fiscal woes. Brian Mustanski, director of the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said there’s a need for better understanding of how to provide treatment access to young, gay and bisexual men of color, who are disproportionately affected by HIV. In addition to targeting geographic hot spots, he said, prevention efforts also have to focus on “demographic hot spots.”
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Chicago Tribune
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Does that medicine work for women? Why signing up for a medical study could be your next feminist move
“This isn’t just a women’s health issue,” says Nicole Woitowich, director of the Illinois Women’s Health Registry and associate director of the Women’s Health Research Institute at Northwestern University, “it’s an everybody’s health issue.”[…]“If we’re not going to be asked to participate in studies,” says Teresa Woodruff, director of Northwestern’s Women’s Health Research Institute, “we should just put our hand in the air. The Women’s Health Registry is a way for us to put our hand in the air.”
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U.S. News & World Report
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Trump’s Goal of No New HIV Cases by 2030 Is Possible, Health Officials Say
Brian Mustanski directs the Institute for Sexual and Minority Health and Wellbeing at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. He agreed that the elimination of new cases of HIV infection by 2030 is possible — given certain conditions. “If we are going to end HIV transmissions in the U.S., we need research to help understand how to effectively deliver the right interventions to the right communities at the right time,” he said. “Every 44 minutes, a 13- to 29-year-old gay or bisexual man in the U.S. gets diagnosed with HIV,” Mustanski added. “These diagnoses are disproportionally among young men of color — the only group in the U.S. to show increases in the rate of annual diagnoses. Any plan to end HIV transmission in the U.S. must center on the needs of young gay and bisexual men of color in order to be successful.”
