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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WBEZ Chicago
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Can prison cause dementia? New Northwestern study explores how incarceration impacts health
Philip Merritt, who was 70 at the time, began struggling to put together sentences and understand what others were saying. Then he could only grunt in response and, eventually, he stopped talking altogether. A research effort at Northwestern University hopes to learn more about how incarceration can be a risk factor for dementia, like Philip Merritt’s. Several studies have explored the connection between poor health and incarceration, but this study is investigating how all the conditions of prison can worsen someone’s health, said Linda Teplin, PhD, the study’s principal investigator. “This is the first study ever to look at how the dose of incarceration has affected health and aging,” Teplin said. “When you study anything in epidemiology as a risk factor for disease, you look not just at, ‘Yes or no, does the person have that risk factor?’ But you look at the dose of that risk factor,” Teplin said. To predict the chance of cognitive decline, people need to be studied before they develop dementia to help identify risk factors, Teplin said. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia. Teplin is building on work she started in the 1990s with the Northwestern Juvenile Project. That effort, which Teplin still leads, was created to track the health and outcomes of incarcerated youth. With this new grant, researchers will continue studying that original group of 1,829 people, now in their 40s. “This is a new question for us,” Teplin said. “We’ve studied only the health needs and outcomes. We have never studied how incarceration affects health.” Teplin also hopes their work will help limit the harm incarceration does and make detention facilities more about rehabilitation than punishment.
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New York Times
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What Drugmakers Did Not Tell Volunteers in Alzheimer’s Trials
Early last year, the Food and Drug Administration approved Eisai’s Alzheimer’s drug, marketed as Leqembi, saying its modest benefit — a slight slowing of cognitive decline for a handful of months — outweighed its risks. This past July, the agency approved a second, similar drug, Kisunla. In a clinical trial, its maker, Eli Lilly, also chose not to tell 289 volunteers that their genetic profiles made them vulnerable to brain injuries, The Times found. Dozens experienced what Lilly classified as “severe” brain bleeding. “The people who are in charge of the clinical trial have not come to grips with the severity of the toxicity” of Leqembi, said Rudolph J. Castellani, MD, a pathology professor at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Castellani performed an autopsy on Jean Terrien, the other high-risk volunteer who died during the Leqembi trial. Scanned images showed widespread bleeding that Dr. Castellani, the Northwestern physician who performed Ms. Terrien’s autopsy, described as “quite unlike anything I really encountered across the spectrum of human illnesses.”
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Yahoo! News
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What is reverse dieting? Experts explain the diet after a diet
If you’ve ever lost weight, you can probably relate to the fact that losing it is easier than keeping it off: About 80% of dieters go on to regain all of the weight they lost, and some end up heavier than before trying to lose weight, according to the Endocrine Society. This common problem is that driving force behind the social media trend known as reverse dieting. The approach to eating was first popularized by bodybuilders, who will often lose weight before a competition and then gradually return to their normal size. Reverse dieting is billed as a way to restore your metabolism, but there’s no evidence that it does, Robert Kushner, medical director of the Center for Lifestyle Medicine at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, explains. Gradually reintroducing food after weight loss is a practical and standard approach used in both research studies and clinical practice, but the reason has to do with keeping an eye on the scale to make sure you’re maintaining and not gaining weight. In other words, it doesn’t trick your metabolism or reset your metabolism; it’s just a common approach to weight maintenance.
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Chicago Tribune
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Will glucose monitors become the next wellness accessory? Abbott Laboratories moves beyond diabetes with new device
In recent years, smartwatches and smart rings have grown increasingly popular, adorning the wrists and fingers of consumers who use them to monitor their exercise, sleep and heart activity. Now, medical device companies, including north suburban-based Abbott Laboratories, are hoping health enthusiasts will embrace a new type of wellness accessory: wearable sensors to track glucose levels. However, not everyone who might benefit from the devices will be able to afford them, raising questions about health equity, said Natalie Cameron, MD, an instructor of general internal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a primary care doctor at Northwestern Medicine. “Communities with poor access to health care, and who might have poor access to food and maybe some of the communities that need these tools the most, if it’s not affordable, we can’t get it to them,” Cameron said. Questions also remain about how useful the devices will be for people without diabetes. Northwestern’s Cameron also worries that the devices could cause some people to experience unnecessary anxiety about their health. “I do think having something monitoring really does help and it’s helped some of the patients I’ve seen,” Cameron said. “There’s a lot of potential to improve health and educate people on what is healthy and when to contact their doctors.”
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NPR
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Besides cancer, breast checkups may also gauge a person’s risk for heart disease
Breast x-rays, better known as mammograms, are typically used to detect breast cancer. But the pictures also show whether arteries in the breast have calcified. But some mammography practices are charging – sometimes over $100 – to have artificial intelligence algorithms look for those calcifications. Often, this extra cost isn’t covered by insurance, says Sadiya Khan, MD, MSc. She’s a preventive cardiologist in Chicago. According to Khan, it should raise a flag. “Why isn’t a health insurance company paying for it? Probably because the evidence isn’t strong enough to suggest that they should be paying for it.” Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women in the United States. But Khan says looking for calcifications in breast arteries is not a proven screening tool. “Just because you have breast artery calcification does not mean you have calcification in your heart arteries or have heart disease, and vice versa. So the false reassurance is also a potential concern.”
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Yahoo! News
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This common ingredient in menopause supplements is dangerous for many women
For some people, menopause symptoms can seriously disrupt their lives. But not all menopause supplements are effective — or safe — to manage those issues, experts warn. More traditional treatments, like hormone therapy, are available and proven to ease some of those symptoms. But not everyone wants to or can take those medications, opening the door for unproven and potentially dangerous supplements sold online. Effectively managing hot flashes, most often through hormone therapy, may have long-term health benefits, too, Lauren Streicher, MD, medical director of the Northwestern Medicine Center for Sexual Medicine and Menopause. Not only do hot flashes last seven years on average (and often longer for Black women), but we also know that “hot flashes are associated with cardiovascular disease, brain fog during perimenopause, potentially declines in cognitive function down the road and multiple other medical problems,” Streicher says. For Streicher, it makes sense to talk about supplements when patients have only mild symptoms, or if they have more intense symptoms and already take a prescription medication but want to try something on top of that. For those interested in phytoestrogen supplements who have a low-risk health history, Streicher recommends looking into S-equol. “It’s the only one that really has science (behind it),” she says, “because it’s the active metabolite of soy, which is what’s been shown to actually potentially help with hot flashes.” Just keep in mind that people’s experiences with these kinds of supplements vary widely, Streicher says, because people metabolize them differently.
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CBS News Chicago
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New research initiative at Northwestern aims to tackle mental health disorders early
Northwestern was awarded $11.7 million grant to address early signs of mental health disorders. “We expect toddlers to have temper tantrums but when they are intense very frequent and hard to redirect over a period of time, it indicates a reason to look at risk,” says Laurie Wakschlag, director of the DevSci Institute at Northwestern University and professor of medical social sciences, pediatrics and psychiatry and behavioral sciences. Further, irritability and difficulty making friends are other early warning signs. The DevSci center is introducing precision medicine into pediatrics for the terrible twos. “We’re trying to breaks through the gap of what science knows and what pediatricians are able to do.” They will be using a risk factor that centers on irritability and will give an individual child’s risk, the probability that child will develop mental health issues and allow the pediatrician to offer resources to see if parents would like to participate in an online prevention to support the family in helping to support the child in managing their emotions. This makes the resources much more accessible as the family doesn’t even need to leave their living room.
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ABC News
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1 in 5 U.S. Adults Say They Feel Loneliness on a Daily Basis: Report
One in five adults reports feeling lonely on a daily basis, according to a new Gallup survey. The survey — part of the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index — found that 20% of adults in the United States feel loneliness “a lot of the day yesterday,” a rise from data collected earlier this year. This is the highest rate of loneliness reported in the past two years. However, the new data is still lower than the peak of 25% of adults who felt lonely during the COVID-19 pandemic from 2019 to 2021. Eileen Graham, PhD, associate professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University School of Medicine, added that the pandemic likely made people more vulnerable to isolation. “There are a lot of aspects of our lives during COVID that became a bit more normalized by tending toward more virtual workspaces,” she said. “Even though there has been a return to work, there are still certain aspects that still have not returned to normal.” Graham suggested that, as a culture, we need to do a better job of getting out of our individual shells and start looking outward. “We have to reach out and cure it for each other,” she said. “Try to identify ways that you can help other people feel like they are meaningfully connected.”
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ABC News
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Indigenous women continue to face barriers to breast cancer care, report finds
A recent report by the American Cancer Society (ACS) showed that the rate of breast cancer deaths among U.S. women has decreased by 44% from 1989 to 2022. But that progress has not held true for all women, including AI/AN women, whose death rates have remained unchanged during that same time. While AI/AN women have a 10% lower incidence of breast cancer than white women, they have a 6% higher mortality rate, according to the ACS. Advocates like Buffalo and organizations like the ACS are also creating toolkits to help existing systems increase their outreach to AI/AN women. However, “there is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach to everything,” Melissa Simon, MD, MPH, an OB/GYN at Northwestern University and founder of the Chicago Cancer Health Equity Collaborative said. “We have to also acknowledge that the patient has some variation too, just like the cancer itself. To treat it has some variation,” Simon said.
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USA Today
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I got 14 medical tests done at this fancy resort. I didn’t need most of them.
Canyon Ranch, a wellness resort, is offering a new longevity program called “Longevity8” with eight health pillars: integrative medicine, mental and emotional health, strength and endurance, sleep, flexibility and fitness, spiritual wellness, nutrition and outdoor experiences. It will cost a pricey $20,000 for single people and $36,000 for couples. Looking at the Canyon Ranch protocol specifically: The most reasonable tests were the bloodwork and diet intake and consultation, according to Dr. Douglas E. Vaughan, professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and the director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute. Specific patient populations might benefit from specialized tests, like the DEXA body composition (i.e. women after menopause who typically lose bone density). Certain symptoms might prompt some of these assessments as well. Asthmatic patients, for example, might want a pulmonary function test after chatting with their doctor. The short answer: No need to break the bank, and if you want to do some additional testing, blood work is probably your best bet. Still, if you’d like to take it a step further, you can easily find specialty facilities and doctors who will be happy to take your check.
