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.

The trouble with asking all adults to do self-exams is that people may miss abnormalities that need treatment and they may be more likely than doctors to discover something that appears troubling but is actually harmless, said Dr. June Robinson, coauthor of an accompanying editorial in JAMA and a researcher at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “It may make some people unduly anxious and result in needless skin biopsies,” Robinson said by email.

The interim findings were released at the annual meeting of the European Society for Bone and Marrow Transplantation. “The data is stunningly in favor of transplant against the best available drugs — the neurological community has been skeptical about this treatment, but these results will change that,” lead investigator Richard Burt, a professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, told BBC News.

Prof Richard Burt, lead investigator, Northwestern University Chicago, told me: “The data is stunningly in favour of transplant against the best available drugs – the neurological community has been sceptical about this treatment, but these results will change that.” The treatment uses chemotherapy to destroy the faulty immune system. Stem cells taken from the patient’s blood and bone marrow are then re-infused. These are unaffected by MS and they rebuild the immune system.

But many studies have found that coffee drinkers typically have lower risks of various diseases than nondrinkers do, explained Marilyn Cornelis, the lead researcher on the new work. The possible benefits include lower risks of Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and certain cancers. “But most of those studies are just looking at associations,” said Cornelis, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “They looked at people’s self-reported coffee intake and their risk of disease.” This study, she explained, tried to “get more at the mechanisms — the biology that might be underlying those associations.”

The rush of medical decisions “doesn’t allow time to deliberate or consider the patients’ overall health or what their goals and values might be,” said Dr. Jacqueline Kruser, an instructor in pulmonary and critical care medicine and medical social sciences at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Many hospitals and health systems are developing “decision aids,” easy-to-understand written materials and videos to help patients make more informed medical decisions, giving them time to develop more realistic expectations.

Dr. Thomas Eiseman, an addiction medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital in west suburban Winfield, said there has been a noticeable increase in opioid-related visits over the last six months to a year, both among bored, disaffected youths and middle-aged users. Increasingly, users are shifting from heroin to stronger synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, and recently Central DuPage Hospital experienced its first death from carfentanil, which is 100 times as potent as fentanyl and 5,000 times as potent as heroin.

“This matters because it indicates that the problem of excess salt intake and its adverse effects on blood pressure cannot be solved by augmenting the diet with other nutrients,” said lead study author Dr. Jeremiah Stamler of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. “The solution is reduction in salt intake,” Stamler said by email. “This is difficult since, as a result of commercial food processing, salt is almost everywhere in the food supply.”

The winning hospitals are categorized into five classes, including major teaching hospitals, teaching hospitals, and large, medium and small community hospitals.The seven Illinois-based winners are:

Major teaching hospitals
Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Chicago
NorthShore University HealthSystem, Evanston
Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
Teaching hospitals
Riverside Medical Center, Kankakee
Large community hospitals
Advocate Condell Medical Center, Libertyville
Advocate Sherman Hospital, Elgin
Edward Hospital, Naperville
Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, Winfield

The majority of transplant centers continue to require a period of alcohol abstinence before doing liver transplants on alcoholics. But the findings have kicked off a growing movement to be more flexible. “It’s a big deal because I think the transplant community is realizing we were being too restrictive previously and there are select patients we believe will do well after a very thorough evaluation,” said Dr. Josh Levitsky, a Northwestern University associate professor of medicine and past board member of the American Society of Transplantation.

Doctors at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, have successfully completed a six-way rare organ transplant exchange performed from living donors. The donors and recipients did not know each other ahead of the surgeries performed over three days last week. “It literally took a village to make this swap happen,” said Dr. Joseph Leventhal, director of kidney transplantation at the hospital, at a press conference today. The 12 participants included three sets of friends, an aunt and a niece, second cousins and a good Samaritan whose efforts started the “swapportunity.”

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