Media Coverage

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.”

Dr. Whitney You, Northwestern maternal-fetal medicine doctor, said pregnant patients sometimes ask: “ ‘It’s OK to have a glass of wine at a baby shower, right?’ I tell them no. No amount is safe because we don’t know.” While the message of “no alcohol” is clear in the medical community, You said, it’s important to make sure patients understand why they’re hearing that message. “The way I approach it is, we have so little control over so many things in life. This is the one thing you have control over,” she said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — It’s pretty extraordinary for people in their 80s and 90s to keep the same sharp memory as someone several decades younger, and now scientists are peeking into the brains of these “superagers” to uncover their secret. The work is the flip side of the disappointing hunt for new drugs to fight or prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Instead, “why don’t we figure out what it is we might need to do to maximize our memory?” said neuroscientist Emily Rogalski, who leads the SuperAging study at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Health systems are more likely to thwart the establishment and practice of breast-feeding than to teach it. “The vast majority of hospital staff members can’t provide the education about how to breast-feed just after birth that so many women want, so instead, women receive conflicting advice or none at all,” wrote Malika Shah, an assistant professor at Northwestern University who specializes in breast-feeding medicine.

A large, randomized controlled trial has found that healthy, first-time mothers who choose induction at 39 weeks actually had a lower chance of requiring a C-section than women who continued on into their pregnancies and either delivered spontaneously or with interventions. To many who work in obstetrics, the results, presented Feb. 1 at the annual meeting of the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine, were “an unbelievable, stunning finding,” said Dr. William Grobman, the principal investigator on the trial and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“Although racial bias may play some role, probably much more important is what hospitals and health systems are used by patients of different races,” said Dr. Joe Feinglass of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, who wasn’t involved in the study