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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US News & World Report
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What Is Syphilis? And Why Are Rates Rising?
“Syphilis is curable in all stages, but there’s a lack of awareness about the causes of the disease, the symptoms of the disease and the availability of testing and treatment,” says Michael Angarone, DO, an infectious disease specialist at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. Syphilis is a common curable sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacteria Treponema pallidum. Syphilis can cause serious health problems if not treated early. It’s transmitted through anal, genital or oral sexual contact, or from a mother with syphilis to a fetus. Without treatment, which consists primarily of penicillin shots, syphilis can cause serious problems, including damage to the brain, the heart and other organs. It can also cause blindness, deafness, paralysis and sometimes death. About 10% of patients who are not treated for syphilis end up dying from this infection. In addition to better educating patients to be open and honest with healthcare providers about their sexual activity, healthcare providers need to learn how to speak with patients about STIs.
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HealthDay
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Ischemic Stroke: What It Is, Symptoms, Causes, Treatment & Recovery
Ischemic stroke is the most common type of stroke. An ischemic stroke occurs when there is a blockage of blood flow to part of the brain. This blockage leads to decreased blood flow and prevents the brain tissue from getting the oxygen and nutrients it requires, resulting in temporary or permanent brain injury. The blood vessel blockage in an ischemic stroke can be thrombotic (where a blood clot forms in an artery going to your brain) or embolic (where a wandering blood clot, called an embolus, is formed elsewhere in your body — usually the heart or neck — and travels up to the brain to block an artery). As a doctor specializing in vascular neurology and stroke at Northwestern Medicine Palos Hospital, some of the potential causes for ischemic stroke Kristin L. Miller, MD
sees include: long-standing high blood pressure, plaque or cholesterol buildup in the arteries, abnormal heart rhythms, blood clots caused by cancers, injury to the arteries leading to the brain, drugs of abuse, infection of the heart valves, genetic disorders that make people more susceptible to certain types of strokes and unknown causes. -
WebMD
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Help Children With Mental Health Issues Before They Escalate
In the Georgia shooting, the alleged shooter, 14-year-old Colt Gray, “had been begging” his family for help with his mental health, according to the account his aunt shared with The Washington Post. While that help never came, law enforcement officials said Colin Gray bought his son an AR-15, a semiautomatic assault rifle, for Christmas. It is that rifle that Colt Gray is accused of using when he allegedly killed two students and two teachers, while wounding nine others, at his high school. Suicidal and homicidal behaviors rarely develop overnight. But parents aren’t given an instruction manual for how to treat their child’s mental health issues, and many of them are left in the dark, said Jessica L. Schleider, PhD, an associate professor in the departments of Medical Social Sciences, Pediatrics, and Psychology at Northwestern University. Unfortunately, denial of a child’s mental health challenges is a natural response that in some ways parents have to fight against, Schleider said. Parents are prone to blame themselves for anything that’s going wrong with their child. It’s a painful experience even when it’s not accurate because mental health troubles can happen regardless of what a parent is doing or how supportive they are of their child. Still, parents need to understand that acknowledging mental health challenges doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It simply means you’re opening up a line of communication. “The desire to think that everything is OK in part comes from the desire to think that parents haven’t done anything wrong,” said Schleider.
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NBC 5 Chicago
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High doses of ADHD drugs linked to a greater risk of psychosis
Taking a high dose of ADHD drugs is linked to more than five times greater risk of developing psychosis or mania, according to a new study published Thursday in the American Journal of Psychiatry. The research is among the first to find a relationship between escalating doses of the drugs — amphetamines, in particular — and a greater likelihood of psychotic symptoms. The link between amphetamines and psychosis isn’t new. Amphetamines increase levels of dopamine in the brain. The neurotransmitter plays a number of roles in the body, including in memory, motivation and mood, but it’s also implicated in psychosis. What hadn’t been established was that the risk of psychosis rose with higher doses, a phenomenon known as a “dose-response relationship.” “That’s what this study provides,” said Will Cronenwett, vice chair for clinical affairs in psychiatry at Northwestern Medicine. “The United States is having sort of an amphetamine moment right now,” Cronenwett said. “The popularity and use of amphetamines is high and getting higher.” Cronenwett said the risk of developing psychosis from an amphetamine remains rare, around 1 in 1,000. Still, people taking high doses should be aware of the risks. “I would counsel patients who have a personal or family psychiatric history of serious mental illness, including things like bipolar disorder with mania or schizophrenia,” he said. “If these sorts of illnesses are in the family tree, then that’s somebody who might want to be very careful about how much of these medicines they use and in what doses.”
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US News & World Report
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Blood Test Could Gauge Your Odds for Lung Trouble Like COPD
An experimental blood test could one day help identify people most likely to develop severe lung problems like COPD. The test reviews a panel of 32 proteins in blood that best predict people most likely to suffer a rapid decline in lung function, according to a study published recently in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Adults with higher test scores have: an 84% increased risk of COPD, 81% increased chance of dying from a respiratory disease like COPD or pneumonia, 17% increased risk of requiring hospital care for respiratory problems, 10% increased risk of respiratory symptoms that need treatment, like a cough, mucus or shortness of breath. “Loss of lung function on a year-over-year basis is associated with poor respiratory health outcomes, but we do not have a good way to easily figure out if a patient is on a steep trajectory of lung function decline,” said researcher Ravi Kalhan, MD, MS, a professor of pulmonary medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “If we had an easy-to-implement clinical tool, like a blood test, that captured someone’s lung function trajectory at a single time point, it would enable earlier interventions which might, in the long run, improve lung health,” Kalhan added.
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ABC 7 Chicago
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What you need to know about ‘sloth fever’ after 21 cases confirmed among US travelers
Health officials are warning Americans about a rare insect-borne virus that has infected several travelers. As of Aug. 16, there have been 21 cases of Oropouche virus disease, sometimes called “sloth fever,” detected among U.S. travelers returning from Cuba, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC said it wants clinicians and public health offices to be aware of the virus and to test for suspected cases, and for travelers to protect themselves from insect bites. Common symptoms include fever, headache, chills, muscle aches and joint pain, typically lasting about two to seven days and then disappearing. Patients may experience other symptoms including nausea, vomiting, rash, sensitivity to light, dizziness and pain behind the eyes. “This virus is an interesting one in that about a week later, 50% or more of people will have a recurrence of the symptoms,” Michael Angarone, DO, an infectious diseases specialist at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, told ABC News. “So, the symptoms will recur and, again, be present for around five days to seven days and then go away. So, I think that’s a very interesting aspect of this virus.”
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WebMD
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Ways to Tame Stress When You Have CAD
Stress is something we all deal with. And when you have coronary artery disease, stress management is a key part of taking care of yourself. For all animals — including humans — stress is a basic instinct. It’s the body’s fight or flight response for fending off danger. It presses the “pause” button on our bodily functions and puts all our energy toward the threat at hand. And it’s not always bad. In fact, it might even save your life. “Acute stress is something that we want,” says Alyssa Vela, PhD, a clinical health psychologist in Chicago. “If you didn’t have that reaction in the body, you might just walk out onto Michigan Avenue and not pay attention to any of the cars or buses driving past.” The trouble happens when our stress response is activated around the clock, says Kim Feingold, PhD, Vela’s colleague at Northwestern’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute, where their small team helps people adjust after a heart disease diagnosis. That includes managing stress. “Activating our stress response is appropriate and healthy when there’s an impending threat,” Feingold says. “But when we get cut off in traffic, or we’re on hold for a long time with an insurance agent, or we’re getting spam calls at an inconvenient time, or we’re having an argument, our body is not in jeopardy the same way that it was thousands of years ago, when our stress response was created. Yet we continue to activate our stress response in these situations.”
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TIME
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9 Weird Symptoms Cardiologists Say You Should Never Ignore
Cardiologists are sharing the weird symptoms that patients often brush off—but which could actually signal a serious heart problem. These include a sinking feeling in your chest, whooshing in the ear, pain or fatigue in the legs while walking, changes in your feet or legs, jaw or neck pain with exertion, indigestion and nausea, carpal tunnel discomfort paired with shortness of breath, sudden stabbing chest pain and trouble with daily activities. Valvular disease is a growing focus area in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease, says Charles Davidson, an interventional cardiologist who’s vice chair of clinical affairs in the department of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. While coronary disease occurs when the arteries that supply the heart become blocked, valvular disease indicates that the heart’s valves aren’t working well. Unlike a sudden cardiac event—say, a heart attack—valvular disease develops slowly, over five to 10 years. Many patients don’t experience symptoms until later in the course of disease, if at all, Davidson says.
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NBC News
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Death threats, legal risk and backlogs weigh on clinicians treating trans minors
Twenty-six states now have restrictions on transgender health care for minors, according to the LGBTQ think tank Movement Advancement Project. The laws have left those still able to provide this type of care, like Goepferd, struggling to keep up with demand. More than a third of transgender teens in the U.S. now live in states with bans on trans health care for minors, according to the Movement Advancement Project. These restrictions have driven thousands of young people to seek transition-related care out of state, straining resources at the network of gender clinics still open. Three-quarters of the providers NBC News interviewed had waitlists of at least three months, with some as long as a year. Sumanas Jordan, MD, PhD, medical director of Northwestern Medicine’s Gender Pathways Program in Chicago, said her clinic is flooded with calls every time a ban passes. “We actually have a script, because the volume increases so much that we have to have a lot of people help us,” Jordan said, noting that Northwestern’s calendar has remained “constantly full” even as more appointments have been added.
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Yahoo! News
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Everything to Know About Hypnotherapy for IBS, Which Experts Say Is a Legit Treatment
If you’ve ever been seriously worried about something and then ended up with a case of diarrhea, you may have guessed that your mind and gut are as tightly wed as an old married couple. For many people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), that close relationship can look like a revolving door: Anxiety causes constipation, cramps, stomach pain, and diarrhea, which then leads to stress followed by more symptoms—it’s a vicious cycle. The good news is that there are therapies that can break the cycle, including one that often gets some side-eye: hypnosis. If you’re skeptical, keep in mind that this isn’t about some mystic who wants to make you cluck like a chicken. Known medically as gut-directed hypnotherapy, it’s a real thing that’s recommended by experts, particularly for folks with IBS that’s triggered by psychological factors. IBS is officially considered a “disorder of gut-brain interaction,” which basically means there’s a messed up communication somewhere. “As an example, the brain may misinterpret a normal digestive sensation as something abnormal,” Kathryn Tomasino, PhD, a GI psychologist and assistant professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said.
