Media Coverage

“The reports of cancer transmitted at the time of organ transfer to recipients are exceedingly rare,” said Dr. Steven Flamm, medical director of the liver transplant program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. “In the U.S. there has been hundreds of thousands of organ transplants, and the number of times this has been reported are close to zero. Still, no screening test is perfect. A mammogram may not pick up a very small cancer. So there is no way to eliminate the risk to zero.”

“Breast cancer in men is extremely rare,” says Rena Zimmerman, MD, medical director of radiation oncology at Northwestern Medicine McHenry Hospital. “But it is the same, pathologically, as breast cancer in women.” According to the American Cancer Society, 1 in 833 men are diagnosed with breast cancer, and 2,550 new cases were diagnosed in in 2018. African-American men are more likely to get it than other men, Zimmerman says.

Surgeons write 28 million opioid prescriptions each year, but 75 percent of the pills go unused and many end up contributing to opioid addiction. This is a crisis that one hospital hopes to end with a new kind of drug take-back program.

The discovery was made by a team from Northwestern University while studying the medial entorhinal cortex of mice. Located in the mid-temporal lobe, it’s the part of the brain associated with memory and navigation. And since it encodes spatial information in episodic memories, lead study author Daniel Dombecktheorized that it could function as a sort of “inner clock” as well. “There are many similarities between the brains of mice, cats, dogs and humans,” Dombeck told Fox News. “We all have a medial entorhinal cortex (the region we found that may act as an inner clock), so it’s logical to think that this brain region serves a similar function in all of these different species.”

A 2017 paper by Northwestern University researchers Alex Song, Thomas Severini and Ravi Allada published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science examined travel by big league teams from 1992-2011. “We observed that jet-lag effects were largely evident after eastward travel with very limited effects after westward travel,” the authors wrote. “Jet lag impacted both home and away defensive performance. Remarkably, the vast majority of these effects for both home and away teams could be explained by a single measure, home runs allowed.”

Researchers looked at the concussion history of 87 football players at Penn State University. They also checked the players for certain genes. The findings suggest that “genotype may play a role in your susceptibility for getting a concussion,” said co-corresponding author Dr. Hans Breiter. He’s a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago. “In dyslexia, you tend to have less-defined wiring for processing spoken and written language,” Breiter said in a university news release. “Dyslexics have a problem with that. Their wiring is more diffuse in this system. Future studies could directly test if diffuse wiring is better able to absorb a shockwave than clearly defined wiring.”

“This is an important problem, a large problem, and it’s a problem nationally,” says Mark Reinecke, chief of psychology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. A recent study, co-sponsored by the National Council for Behavioral Health and the Cohen Veterans Network, and conducted by research firm Ketchum Analytics, showed that 94 million Americans have had to wait longer than one week for mental health services.

Simple facial exercises can speed the wrinkle-smoothing effects of botulinum toxin (Botox), according to researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago. “Patients often leave getting their Botox to the last minute,” lead researcher and professor of dermatology Dr. Murad Alam said in a university news release. “If people get their botulinum toxin right before a social engagement or important work event, they may worry it won’t start working in time,” he added. “Speeding up the effects could be important to people.”

What they found was that not only did participants sleep much better in the room with overall darkness, they had much lower levels of insulin. This is a major finding, because insulin is the hormonal signal to the body to increase weight. The higher your insulin levels are, the more weight you gain, regardless of how much you eat or exercise. “Our preliminary findings show that a single night of light exposure during sleep acutely impacts measures of insulin resistance,” lead author Ivy Cheung Mason said in a statement. “Light exposure overnight during sleep has been shown to disrupt sleep, but these data indicate that it may also have the potential to influence metabolism.”

Lurie Children’s Hospital and Northwestern Medicine are teaming up to try and address this. On Saturday at six different sites in northern Illinois and in the Chicago area, they’re offering safe places to get rid of extra prescription pills. The goal is to reduce the risk of addiction. Dr. Jonah Stulberg is one of the people leading that effort. He’s an assistant professor of surgery at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine and he joined us on the line.