Media Coverage

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.”

Longevity in men who were overweight but not obese was similar to that of men of normal weight. But they had an increased risk of cardiovascular disease at a younger age. “We were able to measure how much time is spent in healthy life years rather than just life span,” said the study’s senior author, Dr. Sadiya S. Khan, an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern. “Maintaining a healthy B.M.I. is associated with a longer, healthier life, with less risk for cardiovascular disease.”

The momentum of hospital care can make people feel as if they’re on a moving train and can’t jump off. 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 choices, giving them time to develop more realistic expectations.

The safest way for teens to sext is to avoid sharing any pictures they wouldn’t want every person at school to see, said Dr. Matthew Davis, a researcher at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Because sexts are permanent and so easily sent from person to person, sexts can turn a natural and usually fairly private part of growing up into a public and often emotionally distressing problem,” Davis, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.

That idea was recently tested in a small study of middle-aged women that researchers believe was the first research of its kind evaluating whether facial exercises or facial “yoga” might improve skin appearance, thereby helping people look a little younger. “What we found was that when you enroll people into a facial exercise regimen – one that in our case required exercising once a day for 30 minutes for the first 12 weeks, and every other day thereafter – we did in fact get some noticeable improvements in facial appearance,” reported Dr. Murad Alam, a dermatologist and vice chair and professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. He led the research published last month in JAMA Dermatology. “In particular, we found that the upper and lower cheeks – the central part of the face, if you will – became plumper and fuller over time.”