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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Chicago Tribune
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Lingering long COVID looms even as Chicago hospital admissions decline, Northwestern research shows
Chicago is seeing its lowest COVID-19 hospital admission rates for the entire pandemic. But it’s not all good news about the illness that one shut down the world. Even as the city’s top doctor shared optimism about the state of the pandemic, Northwestern Medicine clinicians warned the public to be wary of the disease’s lingering effects. The directors of the hospital system’s Comprehensive COVID-19 Center released a study Thursday on “long COVID” symptoms. It showed thousands of patients have suffered from a wide array of serious medical issues that highlight the illness’s lasting harm and the importance of a treating long COVID with a multidisciplinary approach, they said. However, even as hospital admissions go down, the leaders of Northwestern Medicine’s Comprehensive COVID-19 Center said their practice is expanding. “We are actually ramping up, because nowadays, even if it’s not filling up hospitals with sick patients with pneumonia, COVID-19 is still affecting thousands of people,” said Dr. Igor Koralnik, the center’s co-director. Center co-director Dr. Marc Sala said he doesn’t think the public and policymakers are paying enough attention to long COVID. Interest in the disease’s lingering effects has faded amid the declared “end” of the pandemic, he said. “You will have many patients come to us still in good numbers to fill up our clinics,” Sala said, “with symptoms that are enough to be disabling to their lives as previously known.”
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The Wall Street Journal
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What if We Could Get Rid of Menopause?
Though menopause—a full year without a menstrual cycle—is associated with the end of fertility, it also marks another profound but less recognized change. When the ovaries stop functioning and releasing important hormones, biological aging in women speeds up, increasing the risk of numerous health problems. At Northwestern University, Francesca Duncan, PhD, co-director of the Center for Reproductive Science, discovered several years ago that the tissue around the ovarian follicles stiffens with age, threatening the health of the eggs. She is now trying to see whether a drug approved to treat pulmonary disease might help to prevent this development. “You would maintain hormone function for a longer period of time,” she says. “So we’re both preserving the endocrine function and fertility.”
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CBS News Chicago
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Northwestern Medicine shares new findings from ongoing COVID study
Northwestern Medicine has released new findings in an ongoing study of long COVID. Northwestern has been studying patients at its Comprehensive COVID-19 Center since May 2020. More than 1,800 patients have been evaluated. Researchers found, among those tested, 85% reported decreased quality of life, 51% said they had cognitive impairment, 45% had altered lung function, 83% had abnormal CT chest scans, and 12% had elevated heart rate on rhythm monitoring. Those who reported cognitive impairment or lung issues were most often patients who were hospitalized by COVID-19. Long COVID occurs in about a third of COVID survivors and is now the third leading neurologic disorder in the United States.
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Yahoo! News
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A 33-year-old who got light-headed at the gym tried to push through it. He was having a stroke.
A 33-year-old man told himself he could push through is workout when he felt light-headed in a workout class. Instructors called an ambulance, and by the time paramedics arrived he had lost control of his left arm and leg, and couuldn’t stand up by himself. Doctors at Northwestern Medicine confirmed he was having a stroke and performed emergency surgery to remove a blood clot that was blocking blood flow into the right side of his brain. ests revealed the man had an aneurysm — which is a bulge in a blood vessel caused by a weakness in its wall — in his aorta, the main artery that carries blood away from your heart to the rest of your body. “We did find an aortic aneurysm that would have otherwise been undetected in his lifetime, and undetected aneurysms continue to grow and ultimately cause a dissection or rupture which is catastrophic,” one of his doctors, Dr. S. Christopher Malaisrie, said in a news release.
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TODAY
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FDA approves first over-the-counter birth control pill in the US
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the oral contraceptive Opill for over-the-counter sales, making it the first hormonal contraceptive pill available in the U.S. without a prescription. The approval marks a major win for medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which have been pushing for years for an over-the-counter birth control pill. It also comes amid legal battles over women’s reproductive rights. “This is a monumental decision,” said Dr. Melissa Simon, a professor of clinical gynecology at Northwestern University. “OTC birth control is available in over 100 countries, so we’ve been behind in availing safe, effective such as this oral contraceptive pill to individuals who are trying to avoid pregnancy.” Ultimately, the FDA committee agreed most women could determine on their own whether the medication was appropriate for them to use.
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Northwestern Medicine filling in the blanks on long COVID
The directors of Northwestern Medicine’s Comprehensive COVID-19 Center have discovered that the predominant population of patients suffering from long COVID-19 syndrome are largely white women in their 40s who were not hospitalized with COVID and are suffering cognitive impairment and decreased quality of life. Still there’s not a one-size-fits-all set of symptoms or treatments among long COVID patients, says Dr. Marc A. Sala, co-director of the center and one of the nation’s first doctors to provide specific research into the new syndrome. With about a third of the 100 million people in the U.S. who came down with COVID suffering long-lasting symptoms like brain fog, shortness of breath, chest pain and a wide variety of other symptoms, there remains a significant demand for patient appointments, said Dr. Igor Koralnik, the other co-director of the center. “To date, we’ve treated nearly 4,000 patients from 44 states at the (center), and our team of 42 clinicians continue to see approximately 100 patients each month,” Koralnik, chief of neuroinfectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine, said in a previous statement. “The disease burden of long COVID continues to grow in this country with significant implications for the economy and population health.”
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TIME
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Pence Would Ban Abortions When Pregnancies Aren’t Viable. His GOP Rivals Won’t Say if They Agree
In a Republican presidential field full of candidates opposed to abortion rights, Mike Pence stands out in his embrace of the cause. He has advocated pulling from the market a widely used abortion pill that has a better safety record than penicillin and Viagra. In a recent interview, Pence went even further, saying abortion should be banned when a pregnancy isn’t viable. Such a standard would force women to carry pregnancies to term even when doctors have determined there is no chance a baby will survive outside the womb. “One of the things that you cannot understate is the difficulty for a woman to carry a nonviable pregnancy,” said Alan Peaceman, MD, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It is psychological torture to go out in the world, for people to see your pregnancy — and people will come up to you and want to talk about your pregnancy. And that puts the woman in a terrible position that nobody should be in unless they chose to be in that position.”
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USA Today
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33-year-old stroke survivor recalls 1st symptoms he almost ignored
A stroke occurs when a blood clot in another part of the body, such as the heart, breaks off and makes its way to the brain. There, the clot can restrict blood flow, causing symptoms such as the weakness and loss of vision that McKeown experienced. It’s not unusual for people having a stroke to miss the first signs, like weakness on the left side of the body, Dr. Ali Shaibani, chief of neurointerventional radiology at Northwestern Medicine and part of McKeown’s medical team, said.
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Two advancing heart devices: Abbott’s dual-chamber pacemaker and NU’s dissolvable imaging monitor
Northwestern University researchers are working on cardiac devices that are significantly smaller than a AAA battery. And the temporary monitoring devices are designed to melt away into the body when their mission is accomplished. Experimental cardiologist Dr. Igor Efimov at Northwestern and Dr. Luyao Lu, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at George Washington University, have developed a new heart device that combines two earlier technological developments: work with Northwestern inventor John Rogers on a transient pacemakers and a graphene “tattoo” for treating cardiac arrhythmia. The soft, wireless implant can monitor the heart, show what areas of the heart are functioning well or poorly and restore normal heart rhythms, a Northwestern Medicine statement said. The device has shown promise in testing in small animals, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The implant would be a boon for patients who have developed heart rhythm complications as a result of a heart attack, surgery or other treatment, said co-senior researcher Igor Efimov, an experimental cardiologist and professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern University in Chicago.
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Chicago Tribune
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Women with opioid use disorder face stigma in getting help, seeking treatment
Traditionally, individuals affected by past drug epidemics have been overwhelmingly male. The standard of care for opioid use disorder is to at least assess if people need residential treatment, said Lindsay Allen, PhD, a professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who recently published a study about the use of residential opioid use disorder treatment among Medicaid enrollees in nine states. The American Society for Addiction Medicine has an established criteria to determine the most appropriate treatment path for a person’s needs, strengths and support system, among other variables. But just 7.5% of Medicaid enrollees with opioid use disorder receive residential treatment, Allen’s study shows. State mental health agency expenditure per capita in Illinois is in the bottom 20% of all states, according to data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Women bear the brunt of this lack of support, said Allen.
