Media Coverage

Laura Streicher, clinical associate professor of obstetric and gynecology at Feinberg, says about 36 percent of people report having low libido. Contrary to popular belief, the phenomenon is caused by brain activity, not a hormone imbalance.

Craig Garfield, a neonatal hospitalist at Northwestern’s Prentice Women’s Hospital and an attending physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital, is developing an app that directly connects new parents to real-time information about their babies in intensive care. It’s the first app of its kind, according to Garfield. He’s working on it with Young Seok Lee, an adjunct professor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine who has a Ph.D. in industrial engineering.

Both the biological clock and the enormous demands of their careers may drive women to leave jobs in medicine to find work-life balance. Taking the biological clock partly out of the equation with egg freezing may help chill the burnout trend, allowing more women to stay in the medical field and continue practicing what they trained so hard to do.

Dr. Karl Bilimoria put it this way: “If you had your surgery in the morning on a Monday and Monday evening you had a complication that required you going back to the operating room at midnight, would you want the on-call person there or the team that was there and did your first operation in the morning who knew everything that happened and had a relationship with you? “Things get lost when doctors hand things off to each other,” said Bilimoria, director of the Surgical Outcomes and Quality Improvement Center at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

There is evidence, for example, that exposure to morning light is associated with appetite and weight control, said Dr. Phyllis Zee.

She said the new experiments are important because they demonstrate just how powerful exposure to natural light — and darkness — can be.

“Just two days of summer camping reset people’s clocks,” said Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Outside, “you are pretty constrained by natural light-dark cycles and the intensity and light spectrum that you see in nature,” says Dr. Phyllis Zee, director for the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University who was not involved with the study. Natural light, particularly morning sunshine, which is enriched with blue light, has a very powerful influence on setting internal clocks

There is evidence, for example, that exposure to morning light is associated with appetite and weight control, said Dr. Phyllis Zee.

She said the new experiments are important because they demonstrate just how powerful exposure to natural light — and darkness — can be.

“Just two days of summer camping reset people’s clocks,” said Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.

There is evidence, for example, that exposure to morning light is associated with appetite and weight control, said Dr. Phyllis Zee.

She said the new experiments are important because they demonstrate just how powerful exposure to natural light — and darkness — can be.

“Just two days of summer camping reset people’s clocks,” said Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Outside, “you are pretty constrained by natural light-dark cycles and the intensity and light spectrum that you see in nature,” says Dr. Phyllis Zee, director for the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University who was not involved with the study. Natural light, particularly morning sunshine, which is enriched with blue light, has a very powerful influence on setting internal clocks.

However, this Northwestern University study found that doing even about one-third of that amount is still beneficial. The study involved more than 1,600 adults 49 or older who had arthritic pain or stiffness in their hips, knees or feet.