Media Coverage

A team of international researchers led by Northwestern University found that HIV is still replicating in lymphoid tissue, even when it is undetectable in the blood of patients on antiretroviral drugs. The findings provide a critical new perspective on how HIV persists in the body despite potent antiretroviral therapy.

Dr. Clyde Yancy, guideline update committee chair, explained that “not every patient is a good candidate for every drug; these guidelines can help physicians decide who best fits which treatment.” Yancy is chief of cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “This document details the benefits and risks of these new therapies so that patients at high risk can be directed towards alternative therapies,” he added.

Juan Carlos Caicedo, MD, director of the Hispanic Transplant Program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and Talia B. Baker, MD, director of the living donor liver transplant program at Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Many doctors don’t have a good way of knowing whether patients are skipping medication doses, new research suggests. The physicians in the study agreed it’s important to talk about medication adherence with their patients – but still, the topic rarely came up during office visits. Dr. Neil Stone of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago and his co-author Rosemary Hines surveyed 21 doctors and 66 patients at four cardiology practices in Chicago during the summer of 2015. Overall, 61 percent of the patients said they rarely or never talked with their doctors about how often they took their medications. Eight patients had poor adherence – but in only one of those cases did the doctor realize it. Thirty-six patients had only moderate adherence.

In pregnant women, listeriosis can cause miscarriages or stillborn births. It can be fatal for the elderly and those with suppressed immune systems, said Dr. John Flaherty, a professor of infectious diseases at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. For everyone else, an infection might present symptoms typically associated with food poisoning — nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. Listeria, the microscopic organism that causes the infection, is extremely common, though, and typically goes unnoticed. “If we were to swab most people’s refrigerators, you’d probably find it,” Flaherty said. “It’s hard to escape it.”

A family’s income may play a big role in the type of care a child with food allergies receives, a new study suggests. The researchers found that poorer families — those making under $50,000 a year — spent less on non-allergenic foods, medical specialists and important medications, such as lifesaving epinephrine injectors. As a result, “poor people may therefore be experiencing more food allergy reactions,” said study co-author Dr. Ruchi Gupta. She’s the director of the Program for Maternal and Child Health at Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago.

Researchers have come up with a new method to visualize this event, which appears like a spark of color being emitted from the cell. For the first time, scientists have now observed this “spark”—caused by the release of charged particles of zinc, a metal that plays a pivotal role in the metabolism and development of the egg and embryo—emitted from human eggs. Previous work on mouse embryos shows that eggs of higher quality produced stronger zinc “sparks,” and it’s likely that the same would hold true in humans, according to Teresa Woodruff, an expert in ovarian biology at Northwestern University.

The flu vaccine isn’t recommended for infants under 6 months of age because their immune systems can’t yet respond to the vaccine in a way that would allow them to develop enough protective antibodies, Dr. Tina Tan said. She’s a professor of pediatrics at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, and was not involved with the study.

The flu vaccine isn’t recommended for infants under 6 months of age because their immune systems can’t yet respond to the vaccine in a way that would allow them to develop enough protective antibodies, Dr. Tina Tan said. She’s a professor of pediatrics at Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, and was not involved with the study.

Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University who contributed to the development of the AHA-ACC risk tool, acknowledges that it’s not perfect, but also finds fault with the Kaiser study. He points out that rather than being representative, the final patient population was relatively healthy; they could not have had a prescription for a statin or a heart event in the past five years. This group is similar to the older, healthy person who might be considered at high risk just because of his age. “They’re trying to answer, ‘Does the risk score work in the real world clinical population?’” he says. “I don’t think they’re left with the real world clinical population.”