Media Coverage

John Phair, MD, a pioneering Northwestern University doctor who spearheaded groundbreaking discoveries in the fight against HIV and AIDS, has died at the age of 89. “He was the number one researcher of HIV and AIDS in the Chicago area, in the Midwest,” Robert Murphy, MD said. “The impact was so tremendous.” Dr. Robert Murphy was Phair’s mentee and serves as the John Phillip Phair Professor of Infectious Diseases at Northwestern. “You think back to 1981, there was a lot of hysteria, a lot of stigmatization, a lot of very irrational thinking. Some hospitals were not letting patients with HIV even come into the hospitals,” Murphy said. “He really calmed everybody down. He said, ‘Let’s follow the science.’” Phair led the first and largest investigation of HIV, the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, which gathered critical data from 1987 to 2012. He also established the Chicago AIDS Clinical Trials Unit, which evaluated HIV treatment.

The new weight-loss drugs that suppress appetite and reduce food cravings can be quite effective at helping people drop pounds, with many losing at least 10 or 20 percent of their body weight while they take the medications. But in the real world and despite the drugs’ effectiveness, as many as half of users quit the drugs within a year, studies show, because of their expense, side effects or for other reasons. Along with taking weight-loss drugs, those who’d exercised while taking the drug had maintained considerably more of their weight-loss during this phase. Many remained at least 10 percent lighter than at the study’s start, and at least some of the weight they’d regained was muscle, leaving them with a healthier body composition than the other groups.“The results are very encouraging,” agreed Robert Kushner, MD, an endocrinologist and professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, who specializes in weight loss. “But further studies will need to be performed to see if a less intense exercise routine” has similar effects on weight maintenance when people stop a GLP-1 drug.

In vitro fertilization, or IVF, is one of the last bastions of hope for couples unable to conceive on their own. “IVF is really common. Infertility affects 1 in 6 people in the United States, and annually in the US alone, we perform about 400,000 cycles of in vitro fertilization,” fertility expert Eve Feinberg, MD, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “If you look collectively at the population of the US just over time, in the 40 years since Louise Brown was born, about 2% of the current population has been conceived with IVF,” she said of the first “test tube baby,” who was born in 1978. However, The Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children and protected under the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. The ruling has alarmed patients, healthcare providers and reproductive rights advocates in the state and beyond. A number of clinics in Alabama have already paused treatment, and patients’ lives have been thrown into uncertainty. “I think it most seriously impacts those who are most vulnerable. We have patients who want to go through IVF, who save up for years to go through it. We have patients who mortgage their houses because their desire to build their family is so profound,” said Feinberg, a practicing reproductive endocrinologist.

When the Alabama Supreme Court issued a surprising decision this month that led doctors to restrict in vitro fertilization treatments in the state, it raised a host of questions that the court did little to answer. In the wake of the decision, doctors and patients have worried that they could be vulnerable to prosecution in any number of medical scenarios that were once routine. Some Alabama facilities have halted or restricted treatment, and patients elsewhere worry that similar rulings or laws may soon come to their states. Some undergoing IVF are attempting to ship their embryos out of Alabama, however it can be difficult. “There are so many checks and balances in order for it to happen safely,” said Emily Jungheim, MD, a professor and chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine who is also a practicing physician. “It’s not something where you can just say, ‘I want to ship them out,’ and it’s going to happen tomorrow.” However, this service can also be very costly. If you don’t have specific insurance coverage, shipping embryos to another clinic or long-term storage facility can cost between $500 and $1,000.

Laser hair removal, when done by a professional, can be a safe, effective and permanent solution for getting rid of unwanted hair. It’s not pleasant, but most dermatologists say it’s tolerable, especially if a topical anesthetic is given beforehand. A common description of how it feels is a rubber band being snapped against the skin. The American Academy of Dermatology Association recommends that laser hair removal should be performed by a medical doctor who is trained and skilled in using lasers. When the lasers are not operated properly, blisters, burns and infections may occur – and these can be painful. Laser hair removal also doesn’t work very well for people with lighter hair. Carolyn I. Jacob, MD, FAAD, associate clinical instructor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, explains that lasers that targeting blond, red, gray or white hair have not been developed yet. It is also expensive. It depends on how vast of an area you want to have done, but the cost typically falls between a few hundred to over a thousand dollars. Multiple sessions may be needed for long-lasting results. Overall, the procedure is very safe when performed by a dermatologist, and the risk of pain or other complications is quite low.

Since it was developed in the 1970s, IVF has become a popular solution for parents struggling to conceive and those using surrogacy to have children. During the procedure, an egg is removed from the patient’s body and combined with sperm in a laboratory. The resulting embryos get transferred into a person’s uterus in hopes of leading to pregnancy. But only some of the eggs exposed to sperm will be fertilized, and of those, only a small fraction will develop into a mature embryo. Because of this inefficiency, doctors often try to fertilize more eggs than needed. “The science behind IVF really shows that one single fertilized egg is not enough,” said Eve Feinberg, MD, associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. If her patients say they want two or three children, Feinberg encourages them to have between two to four embryos frozen for each, she said. When Alabama’s top court ruled frozen embryos are legally children and people can be held liable for their destruction, it complicated the options available to families. At least three Alabama clinics have paused certain IVF operations for the time being due to legal concerns. Democrats in the Alabama state House, meanwhile, introduced a bill Thursday that would declare “any fertilized human egg or human embryo that exists outside of a human uterus is not considered an unborn child or human being for any purposes under state law.”

A longevity lab in Chicago is researching new therapies and interventions to help understand and slow down the human aging process so that people can live longer, healthier lives. “If you want to think about potentially extending your lifespan, the right diet, exercise, healthy habits; avoid high risk activities, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that stress reduction might have impact on aging,” said Douglas Vaughn, MD, director of the Potocsnak Longevity Institute and professor of medicine (cardiology) at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The goal of this institute is to study aging of people with socioeconomic statuses, ethnicities and disadvantages – ultimately learning how to extend these people’s healthspan.

It may be time to remove the salt shaker from your table. New research shows that using salt substitutes may effectively reduce your risk of high blood pressure and boost heart health. The study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology looked at how replacing regular table salt with a potassium-enriched salt substitute might impact blood pressure. Typical table salt is almost entirely sodium chloride. The salt substitute used in the study contained around one-third less sodium chloride than table salt. The salt substitute also contained 25% potassium chloride, which doesn’t raise blood pressure, the study noted. After two years, researchers found that those using the salt substitute were 40% less likely to develop high blood pressure, or hypertension, compared to those using regular salt. The goal of a salt substitute is to replace the concerning component of salt (sodium) with another mineral (potassium) so that it still looks and tastes like salt but can offer a way to reduce risk and cut back on a person’s salt intake, explains Sadiya S. Khan, MD, professor of cardiovascular epidemiology at Northwestern Medicine’s Feinberg School of Medicine and American Heart Association Go Red for Women volunteer. “This is very important because we know that salt is an important driver of poor heart health and risk for high blood pressure,” she notes.

An Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos can be considered “extrauterine children” under state law has major implications for how in vitro fertilization, commonly called IVF, is performed. Each cycle of IVF is a multistep process that is keyed to a patient’s menstrual cycle in the beginning. First, a patient needs to take injectable hormones every day for a 10- to 12-day period, explains Eve Feinberg, MD, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at Northwestern University in Chicago. Those hormones prime multiple eggs to mature inside the ovary, in little fluid-filled sacs called follicles. Patients are monitored regularly, often daily. Once those follicles reach a certain size, the patient takes a different hormone that gets the eggs ready to be retrieved. Each cycle of IVF is a multistep process that is keyed to a patient’s menstrual cycle in the beginning. First, a patient needs to take injectable hormones every day for a 10- to 12-day period, explains Dr. Eve Feinberg, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at Northwestern University in Chicago. Those hormones prime multiple eggs to mature inside the ovary, in little fluid-filled sacs called follicles. Patients are monitored regularly, often daily. Once those follicles reach a certain size, the patient takes a different hormone that gets the eggs ready to be retrieved. “By definition, 45% of all embryos grown in the laboratory ‘die,'” she says. “And the charge of wrongful death can now be applied. As a reproductive specialist, that idea is terrifying,” Feinberg says. “Who wants to assume that risk?”

Patients of color should have access to physicians who are sensitive to skin and hair conditions unique to them and know how to treat them. Sixteen clinics nationwide now specialize in caring for patients of color. The clinics were prompted in part by a history of racial and ethnic disparities that have afflicted the health-care system, experts said. “Communities that have been historically underserved or at times mistreated have a mistrust of the health-care system,” said Roopal Kundu, MD, professor of dermatology and medical education at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and director of its Center for Ethnic Skin & Hair. “We are rebuilding this trust.” The clinics treat conditions common to dark-skinned individuals, such as hyperpigmentation or hypopigmentation, when areas of skin are darker or lighter than the normal skin tone; keloids, or excessive scar tissue that develops once an injury has healed; and hair loss or other scalp disorders. Some of these, such as pigmentation and keloids, occur more frequently in people of color. Others, for example hair loss and scalp ailments, afflict both Blacks and Whites but require different treatments. Many of these clinics are run by dermatologists of color, which inspires patient confidence, experts said.