Media Coverage

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.

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.

The US Food and Drug Administration on Thursday gave full approval to the Alzheimer’s drug Leqembi, clearing the way for insurance coverage of the pricey drug. “The full FDA approval will open the floodgates for people with early Alzheimer’s to get this drug. It’s a big deal because it’s very expensive at $26,500 per year,” Robert Vassar, director of Northwestern Medicine’s Mesulam Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer’s Disease in Chicago, said in a statement released Thursday. “Now, Medicaid and Medicare will cover it as long as patients enroll in a registry to track their progress,” he added. “It’s a big breakthrough because it’s the first disease-modifying drug for Alzheimer’s. This has been the holy grail since the early 1990s when amyloid was discovered, and people were trying to design drugs to eliminate amyloid from the brain,” Vassar explained.

You may not realize it, but you almost certainly know someone who has considered freezing their eggs. The procedure has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, and some employers now cover the cost of egg freezing as a workplace benefit. While freezing one’s eggs doesn’t necessarily guarantee a future pregnancy, it can open up options. Most individuals with the potential to become pregnant are candidates for egg freezing, although there are rare circumstances when this isn’t the case. Examples include people who have gone through premature menopause or who have structural changes in their reproductive organs that would make the egg retrieval process impossible, said Mary Ellen Pavone, MD, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Feinberg School of Medicine and the director of Northwestern University’s in vitro fertilization program.

Officials are urging residents to use caution as smoke from Canadian wildfires continue to blanket the upper Midwest, leaving Chicago and surrounding suburbs with “very unhealthy” air quality. According to the Air Quality Index, residents should limit time outdoors if possible Wednesday, and wear N95 masks if they must continue working outside. As of 1 p.m., Chicago’s Air Quality Index had risen to 228, among the worst in the world, and Dr. Ravi Kalhan, deputy division chief of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Northwestern Medicine, phrased the scope of the problem in an alarming way. “The EPA index of 20 is equivalent to smoking one cigarette a day,” Kalhan said. “Today, the air quality index in Chicago has been approaching 200. That’s like smoking a half-a-pack of cigarettes a day.” Kalhan says such high-intensity exposures to wildfire smoke typically only last a few days, but with increasing exposure to low air quality, there is a chance for “long-term risks” to public health when it comes to heart and lung diseases.

The primary care landscape is changing in ways that could shape patients’ access and quality of care now and for decades to come. A solid and enduring relationship with a primary care doctor — who knows a patient’s history and can monitor new problems — has long been regarded as the bedrock of a quality health care system. But investment in primary care in the U.S. lags behind that of other high-income countries, and America has a smaller share of primary care physicians than most of its European counterparts. When she was in medical school, Natalie A. Cameron said, she specifically chose primary care because she enjoyed forming relationships with patients and because “I’m specifically interested in prevention and women’s health, and you do a lot of that in primary care.” The 33-year-old is currently an instructor of medicine at Northwestern University, where she also sees patients at a primary care practice. Still, she understands why many of her colleagues chose something else. For some, it’s the pay differential. For others, it’s because of primary care’s reputation for involving “a lot of care and paperwork and coordinating a lot of issues that may not just be medical,” Cameron said.

About three-quarters of those interviewed said they sometimes woke up before their alarms, and just under a quarter said they woke up so reliably that they never had to use an alarm. Nobody knows exactly how or why the body is able to do this, but researchers say that our biological clocks, which keep track of time, have something to do with it. Just above the optic nerve in the brain is a master clock called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, said Dr. Ravi Allada, a neurobiologist who specializes in sleep and circadian rhythms at Northwestern University. This clock synchronizes and coordinates our body’s circadian rhythms, which help us prepare for things that happen at various times of day — such as falling asleep at night and waking up in the morning.

A year after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, many physicians and hospitals in the states that have restricted abortion reportedly are refusing to end the pregnancies of women facing health-threatening complications out of fear they might face criminal prosecution or loss of their medical license. Some experts predict those providers could soon face a new legal threat: medical malpractice lawsuits alleging they harmed patients by failing to provide timely, necessary abortion care. Failing to counsel patients about their options and connect them with providers willing to terminate a pregnancy is also possible grounds for a malpractice suit, attorneys said. Katie Watson, JD, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who has studied state abortion bans, said counseling and referral are not prohibited under these laws and that physicians have an ethical obligation to offer those services. “I think breaching the obligation for counseling would make a strong malpractice lawsuit,” she said.

High temperatures are not just uncomfortable, they are bad for your health – and can even be deadly. Of all the natural disasters, extreme heat is the No. 1 killer, studies show, killing more people than hurricanes and tornadoes combined. The “most worrisome consequence” of high heat is heatstroke, said Dr. Scott Dresden, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Northwestern University. With heatstroke, the body can’t cool itself and regulate its temperature. In normal temperatures, your body loses water through sweating, breathing and going to the bathroom. But when humidity rises above 75%, sweating becomes ineffective. Our bodies can let off heat only when the outside temperature is lower than our internal body temperature, usually around 98.6 degrees. If the body’s temperature rises quickly, its natural cooling mechanism – sweat – fails. A person’s temperature can rise to a dangerous 106 degrees or higher within just 10 or 15 minutes. This can lead to disability or even death.

People of color and those in lower income brackets seem to be disproportionately affected by food allergies, compared with people who are White and at higher incomes, a new study finds. “Is it microbiome or disparities that we see causing other conditions that are related to food allergy, or is there something in the environment that’s triggering more food allergies? We don’t completely know,” said Dr. Ruchi Gupta, a co-author of the new study and the director of the Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research and a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Regardless of the reason, Gupta thinks it is important for doctors to be aware that people of color are more likely to have food allergies and says they should screen for them. “I think these disparities have been a little bit hidden and are not getting diagnosed,” she said.