Media Coverage

“The insurance subsidies are going to be retained for a limited amount of time. The premium assistance will peak in 2021 then goes down through 2026. The basis for premium assistance has changed. Before, it was pegged at the second-lowest silver plan; now it will be pegged at the so-called applicable median cost plan.’ The assumption is that this will translate to less premium assistance. But, as they say, results may vary. The impact will vary state to state. Someone’s going to have analyze the Illinois effect.” – Dr. Joel Shalowitz, professor of preventive medicine, Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and health care system expert

An international team of scientists including the Computation Institute has determined the 3-D atomic structures of more than 1,000 proteins that are potential targets for drugs and vaccines to combat some of the world’s most dangerous emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases…”Almost 50 percent of the structures that we have deposited in the Protein Data Bank are proteins that were requested by scientific investigators from around the world,” said Wayne Anderson of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who is director of the project.

“Regenerative medicine can improve quality of life by offering less invasive and more successful approaches to promoting bone growth,” said Samuel I. Stupp, who developed the new nanomaterial. “Our method is very flexible and could be adapted for the regeneration of other tissues, including muscle, tendons and cartilage.”…For the interdisciplinary study, Stupp collaborated with Dr. Wellington K. Hsu, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery, and Erin L. K. Hsu, research assistant professor of orthopaedic surgery, both at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“Sometimes doctors diagnose MS but it’s really a different disease, and sometimes multiple sclerosis is present and it’s not picked up,” says Dr. Roumen Balabanov, a neurologist at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

As most of us age, our brains shrink, which leads to a decline in cognition (or thinking skills) the older we get. “Atrophy is thought to contribute in part to the moments of forgetfulness we experience with aging,” says Emily Rogalski, Ph.D., the director of the study. SuperAgers like Scott, however, lose less brain volume—one study found that over the course of 18 months, ‘normal’ agers lost volume in the cortex (the brain area linked to critical thinking) twice as fast as SuperAgers.

“Don’t scratch” is probably one of the best—and worst—pieces of advice an eczema patient can receive. The skin condition, which is caused by an abnormal immune reaction that results in dry, red, cracked patches of skin, is only made worse by itching. Your nails damage the skin barrier, which then ramps up inflammatory molecules that exacerbate the itch, explains Jonathan Silverberg, MD, PhD, assistant professor of dermatology at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

The most important advice for a woman who wants to get pregnant is to get to know her body, specifically her menstrual cycle, said Dr. Mary Ellen Pavone, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist and medical director of the IVF program at Northwestern Medicine’s Fertility and Reproductive Medicine in Chicago.

Expectant fatherhood gets real at the dads-only class at Northwestern Memorial’s Prentice Women’s Hospital, where pediatrician and dad Craig Garfield shares practical information and personal anecdotes, and fields questions about everything from Velcro swaddling blankets (he’s on the fence) to the strange color of a newborn (yes, they can initially look a little blue).

Female genital mutilation is an umbrella term used to describe various degrees of scraping or cutting female sexual organs, said Dr. Lori Post, a professor in emergency medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who has researched female genital mutilation for decades.

A study following more than 1.3 million premature babies born in Florida found that two-thirds of those born at only 23 or 24 weeks were ready for kindergarten on time, and almost 2 percent of those infants later achieved gifted status in school. “What excites me about this study is that it changes the focus for the clinician and families at the bedside from just focusing on the medical outcomes of the child to what the future educational outcomes might be for a child born early,” Craig Garfield, the first author of the study and an associate professor of pediatrics and medial social sciences at Northwestern Medicine, said in a statement.