Media Coverage

Treating Teen Depression Helps Parents’ Mental Health, Too: Study

Study co-author Kelsey R. Howard also noted that the new findings could be useful for healthcare providers, as they could consider assessing a parent’s level of depression when treating their child.” More young people today are reporting persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness and suicidal thoughts,” said Howard. “At the same time, suicide rates have climbed in nearly all U.S. states. This research may help health care providers as we grapple as a nation with how to address these alarming trends.”

Treating Teen Depression Might Improve Mental Health Of Parents, Too

Those findings led another researcher, Kelsey Howard, to wonder whether the opposite is true — if kids get better, do the parents then feel better?

To answer her question, Howard, a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and her adviser, Mark Reinecke, analyzed data from a 2008 study that followed more than 300 teenagers getting treatment for depression over the course of about nine months — either through counseling, medication or both.

Treating Teens’ Depression May Be Great for Parents’ Mental Health, Too

Few studies, however, have looked at how a child might affect their parent’s own mental health. Kelsey Howard, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University and a co-author of the new research, says she suspects that’s because most of the research done so far has been concerned primarily with the treatment methods themselves, not on the effects of treatment on people’s relationships.

Inducing labor at 39 weeks leads to fewer C-sections, Northwestern study finds

“In the past, induction at 39 weeks in low-risk women hasn’t been offered — it’s actually been withheld, forbidden, and patients were actively dissuaded from it,’” said Dr. William Grobman, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, a Northwestern Medicine physician and the study’s lead author. The study’s findings, which will be published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, may prompt doctors and professional medical societies to dramatically change the way they advise pregnant mothers interested in inducing labor, Grobman said.

Helping Nature: Inducing Labor Avoids Cesarean for Some Moms

Being induced doesn’t mean moms can’t have “natural childbirth” — they can forgo pain medicine or use a hospital’s homelike birthing center rather than delivering in “an operating room in a sterile suite with a big light over your head,” said the study leader, Dr. William Grobman, an OB-GYN specialist at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Choosing to induce labor at 39 weeks reduces risk of C-sections, study finds

The notion that inductions can lead to C-sections was based on past data comparing a woman who goes into labor spontaneously with a woman who is induced at the same point in her pregnancy — which could be before the 39th week, if complications developed, or when the woman was overdue and had gone past 40 weeks, said the study’s principal investigator, Dr. William Grobman, a professor of OB-GYN at Northwestern Medicine. In those studies, a link between induction and C-sections existed. But that’s because they included so many different scenarios, he said.

Pregnancy Debate Revisited: To Induce Labor, Or Not?

That rate dropped from 22 percent among the women who weren’t automatically induced to 19 percent for those whose labor was induced. Dr. William Grobman, the study’s first author and a professor of obstetrics at Northwestern University, says it’s an important goal to reduce the rate of cesarean sections in the U.S. So even a small percentage drop in the rate can have benefits overall. But an individual woman might or might not consider that 3-percentage-point drop a big deal. “I think that’s not really for me to decide,” he says.

Elective Labor Induction May Cut C-Section Risk

Dr. William Grobman, the lead researcher on the trial, agreed. Childbirth is “an incredibly personal experience,” said Grobman, an obstetrician at Northwestern University, in Chicago. “Women should have accurate information about the benefits and risks of different options for delivery, so they can make informed choices,” he explained. A full-term pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks, and babies born during the 39th week are considered full-term. But elective induction at that point in pregnancy has been controversial — except in special circumstances, such as when a woman lives far from a hospital.

Even light drinking may make fatty liver disease worse

“The question still remains as to whether wine, particularly red wine (versus beer or liquor), may have some heart and diabetes protective effects in small amounts (no more than 1 glass on average per day) in particular in patients with NAFLD who are at high risk for complications and death from heart disease and diabetes,” said Dr. Lisa VanWagner of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.