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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NBC Chicago
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Team of Northwestern Women Surgeons Saves Patient’s Life
In the medical field, women are the minority when it comes to a career as a surgeon. But one local man is especially thankful for the female surgeons who literally saved his life. The team of surgeons included Leah Tatebe, MD, associate professor of surgery in the Division of Trauma and Critical Care, Katie Bandt, MD, associate professor of neurological surgery, and Vehniah Tjong, MD, associate professor of orthopaedic surgery.
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Long COVID Treatment Not ‘One-Sized-Fits-All
Investigators in the new study looked at the first 600 long COVID patients who were evaluated at the Northwestern Medicine Neuro COVID-19 Clinic, either in person or via telemedicine, between May 2020 and August 2021. Researchers compared those who had been hospitalized for acute COVID-19 pneumonia to those who had had milder forms of the disease (100 vs. 500 patients, respectively). Patients were seen, on average, about 7 months after the start of their COVID illness. Only about 60% of patients regarded themselves as “recovered” from their illness. Both groups of people showed an average of seven neurological symptoms, while more than nine out of 10 said they had more than four symptoms. “An important take-home message of our new study is that COVID affects the nervous system and causes severe decrease in quality of life and also causes cognitive dysfunction in patients,” said senior author Igor Koralnik, MD, chief of neuroinfectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago.
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CBS Chicago
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Long COVID study reveals difference in symptoms based on severity of first infection
Researchers at Northwestern Medicine have been studying the impact of long COVID for months, and now a new study shows there might be a correlation between the severity of an infection and the long-term effects on your brain. Dr. Igor Koralnik, chief of neuro-infectious diseases at Northwestern, explains what the study found.
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New York Times
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Why Do Some People Develop Allergies in Adulthood?
Experts don’t know how common it is for different kinds of allergies to develop in adulthood, said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, a professor of pediatrics who specializes in allergy at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
Though we do have some data as it relates to food allergies. In one survey of more than 40,000 adults in the United States published in 2018, for instance, Dr. Gupta and her colleagues found that about 45 percent of those who had food allergies developed at least one new food allergy in adulthood. Of this group, a quarter never experienced food allergies as children.
An important question for researchers, Dr. Gupta said, is what exactly might cause adults to develop an allergy to a food they’ve eaten before. Right now, she said, we don’t know. -
Chicago Tribune
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Stress is a silent killer for pregnant Black women
Racism in health care likely contributes to the misidentification of symptoms, mistreatment of conditions and inadequate access to high-quality health care resources that, combined, lead to poor maternal health outcomes among Black women.
“We don’t take walk-ins,” the receptionist at my obstetrician-gynecologist’s office at a large academic medical center told me when I showed up without an appointment on a Friday afternoon and asked to be seen by a nurse.
I was close to 28 weeks pregnant. I’d suffered severe headaches throughout my pregnancy. For the past several days, my feet and ankles had been so swollen that I could not lace up my sneakers. The night before, while receiving an award, I was so short of breath that I had trouble speaking. -
The Washington Post
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What SuperAgers show us about longevity, cognitive health as we age
Ageing often comes with cognitive decline, but “SuperAgers” are showing us what is possible in our golden years. “These are like the Betty Whites of the world,” Emily Rogalski, PhD, said. She is a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and associate director of the Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease. She was part of the research team that coined the term “SuperAgers” 15 years ago. It describes people older than 80 whose memory is as good as those 20 to 30 years younger, if not better. What researchers are learning from SuperAgers and about dementia prevention could allow us to discover new protective factors in lifestyle, genetics and resilience for common changes that arise with aging. “It’s invigorating to know that there are good trajectories of aging,” Rogalski said. “It’s possible to live long and live well.” It is not known what percent of the general population qualifies as SuperAgers, but they appear to be rare, Rogalski said. Even when researchers tried to screen only participants who believed they had good memory, less than 10 percent met the definition.
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WBEZ
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Illinois abortion providers say they will continue to provide mifepristone
Medication abortion remains legal and available in Illinois, despite a recent U.S. appellate court decision that put tighter rules on the drug. Katie Watson, an attorney and a bioethicist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said the judges in Texas and Washington have equal authority.
Abortion providers across the state — a haven for abortion services — say they will continue to offer the two-pill combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, which are typically taken up to 48 hours apart to end a pregnancy. -
NBC 5 Chicago
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Northwestern Researchers Hope to End Extensive Wait Lists for Autism Diagnosis
Waitlists for families looking to evaluate their young children for autism are extensive in Illinois, but a new study from Northwestern University hopes to speed up that process. “The waitlists to get an autism evaluation are exceptionally long. They were long before COVID, but then, because we shut down, everything became longer. So waitlists that were nine months now became 24 months,” said Meg Roberts, an associate professor and part of the Northwestern University Early Intervention Research Group. Roberts’ team has received a $3 million grant to help reduce that wait time for Illinois families, as an official diagnosis is often the key to increased access to earlier interventions. “If you have an autism diagnosis, you are eligible for additional services through a health insurance company,” Roberts said. Through the grant, Roberts and her team are conducting virtual evaluations, which they believe improves access for all, improving health equity.
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Northwestern researcher spins out tumor-fighting therapy company
The Northwestern University scientist who’s taking the reins on the Chan Zuckerberg biotech hub has launched her own company, spinning out a cancer therapy that uses tumor-fighting cells found in the bloodstream. The cancer therapy seeks to improve existing cell therapy processes in cancer treatments by extracting circulating tumor-reactive lymphocytes, or cTRLs, from blood, CTRL Therapeutics said in a statement. By extracting cTRLs from blood, rather than from cancerous tumors themselves, the method can avoid invasive and costly surgery and simplify and lessen the expense of creating the individual patient’s therapy, the statement said. “The field of cell therapy has been limited by the lack of tools to isolate and expand tumor-reactive cells that are efficacious against solid tumors,” Shana Kelley said in the statement. Shana Kelley, PhD is a professor of biochemistry and molecular genetics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “This funding enables further optimization and validation of our proprietary technology platform and expansion of our team to support our mission to deliver curative therapies for all individuals living with cancer.”
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Yahoo! News
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How parents can help protect their kids from fentanyl exposure
Fentanyl has made headlines for years, with the narcotic being blamed for the deaths of Prince, Tom Petty and Mac Miller, to name a few. But more recent reports have linked the drug to children and teens – and some have died from accidental fentanyl exposure. Fentanyl is most commonly used by doctors to treat severe pain, including in those with advanced cancer, but it also circulates heavily among illicit drugs. Fentanyl can come in several different forms – liquid, powder, pill or patch – or be added to other drugs. It doesn’t take much fentanyl to do harm. “Fentanyl is very potent — it’s 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine,” Kristine Cieslak, MD, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Lurie Children’s at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital and health system clinician of pediatrics in emergency medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “As little as 2 milligrams can be lethal in adults and even smaller amounts can cause death in children.”
