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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WGN Chicago
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Relief for Highland Park parade survivor: Internal wires reduce pain and improve mobility
It’s not just emotional pain that lingers after a shooting. Gunshot survivors are often left with chronic, debilitating physical conditions and they’re seeking relief from the daily reminder of the damage they suffered. Liz Turnipseed was shot during the Highland Park Parade Shooting two years ago. “As the day would go on my pain level would increase, so the more that I did, the worse it would get,” she said. “It can just be debilitating and take over your life.” Jason Ross, MD, assistant professor of anesthesiology (pain medicine) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine treats patients with chronic pain and that now includes gunshot wound survivors. “When I first met her, we tried a number of different treatments for her including injections and medications,” he said. He placed two sets of internal wires in Turnipseed’s lumbar area and two more at the base of her spine. An implanted battery pack powers a constant electrical stimulus to nearby nerve roots that lead to the spinal cord. Turnipseed hopes sharing her story will help other gunshot wound survivors access the care and resources they require.
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Science
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Why do eggs in ovaries last for decades? Long-lived proteins may be key
Mammals, including humans, are born with all the oocytes—cells that mature into eggs—they will ever have. But unlike the many short-lived cells in the body, some oocytes are alive and healthy even after more than 4 decades. Now, two new mouse studies uncover a possible reason for this longevity, which preserves fertility well into adulthood. Both studies also found some proteins are more likely to stick around than others. One that stands out, says neuroscientist Jeffrey Savas, PhD of Northwestern University, a co-author of the eLife study, is ZP3, which is important because it’s also the receptor on the egg surface that allows sperm to enter. Mitochondria were also rich in long-lasting proteins. Offspring inherit the organelles from their mother, and durable proteins might ensure that mitochondria are sound when they are passed on via eggs. The gradual disappearance of long-lived proteins from the ovaries may help explain why fertility falls after a certain age. Francesca Duncan, PhD, a reproductive biologist at Northwestern and a co-author on the eLife study, says she initially thought the opposite because cells can’t change out long-lived proteins, and they may accumulate so much damage over time that they fail. “I had assumed that if a protein was long-lived, it had to be bad,” Duncan says.
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US News & World Report
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More Green Spaces, Lakes Bring Fewer Hardened Arteries
Parks and lakes aren’t just good for your soul — new research suggests they also appear to protect your arteries. Living near green space and “blue” water space lowers a person’s odds of hardened arteries in middle-aged urban dwellers, researchers found. “Our findings provide quantitative evidence supporting environmental policies to enhance the accessibility and quality of residential blue and green spaces,” said researcher Lifang Hou, MD, PhD, a professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Artery calcification occurs when calcium forms plaques on the walls of arteries. These plaques can combine with blood clots to clog the arteries, causing heart attacks and strokes. These results show that city investments in parks, lakes and other natural spaces “can promote public health benefit and address racial and neighborhood-related health disparities,” Hou said in a Northwestern news release. “Having more green and blue spaces may provide increased opportunities for physical activities, social interactions, stress relief and restoration, all of which have been linked to improved metabolic and cardiovascular health,” Hou explained. “Additionally, exposure to green and blue spaces has been shown to boost people’s immune systems, reduce chronic inflammation and slow down the biological aging process, all of which are biologically important in people’s overall health and cardiovascular health,” Hou added.
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The Wall Street Journal
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Apple Watch Is Becoming Doctors’ Favorite Medical Device
Doctors are using the Apple Watch as part of how they diagnose and help their patients manage disease—whether or not it’s been specifically approved for such applications by the Food and Drug Administration or other regulatory bodies. There’s a large and growing body of research on how the Apple Watch is being used informally in medical care, despite other approved devices being available to track the same metrics. “Not a week goes by in my clinic in which someone doesn’t come by and say, ‘My Apple Watch says I have an abnormal heart rhythm,’ ” says Rod Passman, MD, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. Passman is currently conducting a six-year, National Institutes of Health-funded study, which includes 85 research centers across the country, as well as collaboration from Apple itself. The study is intended to determine whether data from the Apple Watch can be used in an app to significantly reduce the amount of time people with atrial fibrillation have to spend on blood-thinning medications. To conduct this research, Passman and his colleagues applied for and received an exception to FDA rules that allows them to use the watch to alert patients who have already been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation that they are having an irregular heartbeat.
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WebMD
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Many People on Statins May Not Need Them
If you’re taking a statin drug to prevent heart disease, it’s possible that, sometime in the next year or two, your doctor might tell you that it’s no longer necessary. More than 45 million Americans are considered eligible to take statin drugs to prevent heart disease, which can lead to heart attacks or strokes. One reason is that the data for the 2013 version comes from the 1960s through the 1990s, said Sadiya Khan, MD, a professor of cardiovascular epidemiology and associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “Things have changed quite a bit since that time,” including the use of statins and other primary preventive measures, said Khan, who was involved in constructing either risk calculator. The larger and more recent database on which the 2023 equations are based came mostly from a warehouse of electronic health record data, according to the new study.
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ABC News
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White noise machines for infants can be dangerously loud, study says
A new study published in the journal Sleep Medicine analyzed existing data about sound levels of white noise machines and concluded that many devices can produce sounds louder than recommended for even adult workers – making them capable of being too loud for infants, who are more susceptible to negative effects of loud noises. “I don’t think people should be afraid of white noise machines, and for a lot of people that can be really helpful,” said Dr. Landon Duyka, an ear, nose, and throat doctor at Northwestern Medicine who was not associated with the study. However, if parents are seeking to wean their children off these machines, Duyka recommends incrementally decreasing the noise level on the white noise machine until the child no longer needs it. First start with nap time and then implement these changes at nighttime, he said.
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ABC News
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What are the potential risks to fertility and reproductive care post-Roe v. Wade?
Health care groups and advocates have long warned that the overturn of Roe v. Wade could pose wider threats to reproductive healthcare and that anti-abortion groups’ attacks on reproductive freedoms would not stop at abortion care. Fertility specialists suspended care in Alabama after the state Supreme Court issued a decision saying embryos are children, raising concerns that IVF specialists could face wrongful death lawsuits over handling of embryos. One facility said they even suspended the transfer of embryos to facilities in other states amid the confusion caused by the decision. “The legal question is: at what point should a citizen be protected? And where I take issue with the Alabama ruling, is that they utilize their religious beliefs that life begins at fertilization. And that crossed a line, which shouldn’t be crossed due to the alleged separation of church and state, that they now are saying that life gets protected,” Eve Feinberg, MD told ABC News. “It’s very dangerous for the provision of safe fertility care and I think it’s very dangerous from a litigation standpoint, in the numerous instances where pregnancies may end through no fault or embryos may stop growing through no fault,” Feinberg said.
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US News & World Report
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‘A Pretty Cool Experience:’ Having a Kidney Transplant While Awake
John Nicolas was deep into kidney transplant surgery when he decided to ask his doctors if they’d started yet. “At one point during surgery, I recall asking, ‘Should I be expecting the spinal anesthesia to kick in?’” Nicolas, 28, recalled in a news release. “They had already been doing a lot of work and I had been completely oblivious to that fact. Truly, no sensation whatsoever.” Nicolas walked out of the hospital the day after his successful surgery, which occurred on May 24. Typically, kidney transplant patients spend two to three days in the hospital, doctors said. “Inside the operating room, it was an incredible experience being able to show a patient what their new kidney looked like before placing it inside the body,” Satish Nadig, MD, PhD, a transplant surgeon and director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center, said in a news release. “Doing anesthesia for the awake kidney transplant was easier than a C-section,” Vicente Garcia Tomas, MD, chief of regional anesthesiology and acute pain medication at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, said in a news release. “For John’s case, we placed a single-spinal anesthesia shot in the operating room with a little bit of sedation for comfort. It was incredibly simple and uneventful, but allowed John to be awake for the procedure, improving the patient experience.”
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CBS News
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Surgeons perform kidney transplant with patient awake during procedure
Surgeons at Northwestern Medicine performed a kidney transplant on an awake patient, marking a first for the Chicago-based healthcare system. The patient, 28-year-old John Nicholas of Chicago, felt no pain during the May 24 procedure and was discharged the next day. Typically a patient is hospitalized for 2-3 days following a kidney transplant at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Instead of normal general anesthesia, doctors used a single-spinal anesthesia shot, which is similar to what’s used during cesarean sections. “Inside the operating room, it was an incredible experience being able to show a patient what their new kidney looked like before placing it inside the body,” Satish Nadig, MD, PhD, transplant surgeon and director of the Northwestern Medicine Comprehensive Transplant Center, said in the release. The other exciting element? “The patient was able to be discharged home in less than 24-hours, basically making this an outpatient procedure,” Nadig said. “Our hope is that awake kidney transplantation can decrease some of the risks of general anesthesia while also shortening a patient’s hospital stay.” Now Northwestern Medicine is looking to establish the AWAKE Program (Accelerated Surgery Without General Anesthesia in Kidney Transplantation) for other patients who want a similar operation.
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US News & World Report
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Rate of Chronic High Blood Pressure in Pregnancy Doubled in U.S. Since 2008
The number of pregnant women with chronic high blood pressure doubled during the past decade and a half, but treatment remains low among them, a new study found. About 3.7% of pregnant women were diagnosed with high blood pressure in 2021, up from 1.8% in 2008, researchers said. However, prescriptions handed out to pregnant women for high blood pressure remained about the same, with only 60% getting drugs that could lower their blood pressure. Chronic high blood pressure during pregnancy can cause liver or kidney damage, and can double a woman’s risk of future heart failure and other heart disease, the researchers noted. “Since nearly 1 in 3 individuals with chronic hypertension may face a pregnancy complication, the prevention and control of hypertension should be among the highest priorities for improving maternal health,” said Dr. Sadiya Khan, a professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at Northwestern University who was not involved in the study.
