Media Coverage

In an accompanying editorial, Lee Jampol and Debra Goldstein of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine suggest doctors perform thorough eye exams on all babies with microcephaly in areas with Zika outbreaks.

“We’re very concerned about this,” said Jampol, a professor of ophthalmology at Northwestern. “There hasn’t been enough testing yet to know what these babies’ vision is going to be.”

Lee Jampol, a professor of ophthalmology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said that lesions found in the babies’ retinas could have far-reaching effects for families trying to care for the infants and the next generation.

“Exactly how much these babies can see is unknown at this point,” said Dr. Lee M. Jampol, a professor of ophthalmology at Northwestern University, who co-wrote an editorial accompanying the study. But, he added, “when we can see these lesions, that means there’s damage.”

THIRTY years ago a young haematologist called Richard Burt was training at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. He noticed that after leukaemia patients had received a treatment to wipe out their immune systems, they needed to be re-immunised against diseases such as measles and mumps. Although the patients in question had been vaccinated as children, the therapy for their blood cancer had erased this cellular memory. Dr Burt turned to his teacher, William Burns, and ask whether the same might be possible in autoimmune diseases. “I could see a light go on in his eyes. ‘You should try it in multiple sclerosis’ he said.” Thus began decades of painstaking work.

Recent evidence indicates that what you eat and when you eat can in turn affect sleep and circadian rhythms,” says Phyllis C. Zee, MD, PhD, the director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, who says emerging research “points to a bi-directional relationship.”

“Food addiction is not taken seriously by health professionals in the way other addictions are,” said Dr. Julie Friedman, an assistant professor at Northwestern University Medical School, and also the VP of Binge Eating programming at InSight Behavioral Health in Chicago. “If you go to your primary care doctor and say, ‘I’m binging three to four times per week,’ they’ll tell you to go to Weight Watchers.”

Neil Stone, professor of medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, in Chicago, where he practices preventive cardiology, says he counsels patients to find ways to lower their stress, such as carving out 20 minutes for a workout on a home bike or treadmill. “Given the stresses we have, it’s about thinking about priorities,” says Dr. Stone, lead author of the 2013 cholesterol-treatment guidelines issued by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association.

“This is the first time we have randomized trial data on this controversial topic,” said study leader Dr. Karl Bilimoria. “You would think for such a hot-button issue we would have had randomized trial data, which is sort of the gold standard for research, years ago.”

Controversial rules that limit the hours young surgeons can work while in training aren’t needed to protect patient safety, a nationwide experiment finds. “This is the first time we have randomized trial data on this controversial topic,” said study leader Dr. Karl Bilimoria. “You would think for such a hot-button issue we would have had randomized trial data, which is sort of the gold standard for research, years ago.”

Teresa Woodruff, PhD, director of Women’s Health Research Institute