Media Coverage

Air quality alerts issued across Illinois as Chicago ranks worst in the world

Air quality alerts issued Thursday in Illinois because of wildfire smoke marked the latest bout in an increasingly common summer occurrence. The alert covers 34 Illinois counties designated as having unhealthy air for all residents.
Dr. Momen Wahidi, an interventional pulmonologist and medical director of Northwestern Medicine’s Canning Thoracic Institute, says that hospitalizations only went up a little bit during the last two air quality alerts in Chicago this year — but that doesn’t mean this is not a potential problem.

US funding freeze threatens biomedical research

Guillermo Oliver, PhD, the Thomas D. Spies Professor of Lymphatic Metabolism, penned a letter in the journal Science discussing the recent federal funding freeze and its effects on universities as well impacts on clinical, scientific, and technological breakthroughs.

Legionnaires’ Disease Sickens 22 in New York. Here’s What to Know.

How is Legionnaires’ treated? Doctors prescribe antibiotics. The sooner someone starts antibiotics, the more effective the treatment will be, said Dr. Ben Singer, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern Medicine. Most people who take antibiotics will recover from the disease, but some can continue to feel certain symptoms for months.

“Any pneumonia can cause a lingering type of fatigue,” Dr. Singer said. “People can take a long time to get better.”

U.S. News Announces 2025-2026 Best Hospitals

U.S. News & World Report, the global authority in health care rankings and ratings, today released the 2025-2026 edition of Best Hospitals, the 36th year of this annual study. In Chicago Northwestern Medicine-Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Rush University Medical Center were named No. 1 (tied) out of 21 Best Hospitals near Chicago.

Three techniques to help deal with persistent pain

Chronic pain goes beyond the sensory experience of “how much does it hurt and where does it hurt?” says Steven P. Cohen, an anesthesiology professor and vice chair of research and pain medicine at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. Our thoughts, emotions and behavior can significantly affect the physical sensation of chronic pain, he said.

Snapshot of food insecurity in Illinois and the US

In March, the Trump administration paused funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), a federal program under USDA that purchased food from farmers and sent it to food banks. Farmers and nonprofits have suffered alike from the loss of federal funding. The cut diminished 40% of the food the Northern Illinois Food Bank received from TEFAP, according to Robert Desio, senior manager of public policy and benefits for the Northern Illinois Food Bank. According to Lindsay Allen, PhD, a health economist and policy researcher at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, the country is still dealing with supply chain issues from COVID-19. Trump’s tariffs, climate change and the war in Ukraine are making food prices more expensive nationwide, too. Many people in the “SNAP gap” and on SNAP benefits depend on food pantries to supplement the limited food they can afford. Because of the “Big, Beautiful Bill,” even more people will need help from nonprofit food banks and pantries.

Northwestern Medicine research finding opens the door to a viral link to Parkinson’s disease

A Northwestern Medicine research lab has found a usually harmless virus in brain samples from Parkinson’s patients. The idea that Parkinson’s could be linked to a virus had been theorized for years, but this is the first study to pinpoint a specific virus as more common in Parkinson’s patients. “The message that we want to give to the general public is, it opens a new field of investigation, something that we didn’t know about,” said Igor Koralnik, MD, Northwestern’s chief of neuroinfectious diseases and global neurology and lead author of the study. Before this study, Hanson said, HPgV had not been found in human brain tissue. It was understood to primarily “live” in blood. “For this virus to be present in the brain, there must be a reason for that,” Koralnik said. It’s possible that this is why Parkinson’s risk increases with age, Bega said. The longer you live, the more of these “hits” you take, as you encounter different Parkinson’s risk factors throughout your life. “I always caution people who try to blame their Parkinson’s on one thing,” he said. “Rest assured, it’s never one thing that you could have done or should have done differently.”

ER Opioid Prescriptions For Low Back Pain Cut In Half

The rate of ER opioid prescriptions for back pain fell by more than half between 2016 and 2022, researchers reported July 12 in the Annals of Emergency Medicine. Back in 2016, nearly a third of these visits (32%) resulted in a prescription for opioid painkillers, researchers found. That had decreased to more than 13% of visits by 2022, researchers said. “The decline in opioid prescribing shows physicians are responding to evidence and changing their practice at a time of growing awareness of the opioid epidemic,” lead researcher Howard Kim, an emergency physician at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said in a news release. Patients were in considerable pain when they sought help, with an average pain score of more than 7 out of 10, researchers found. On average, they waited about 37 minutes before a doctor saw them, and spent about four hours in the ER. Results show that NSAIDs like ibuprofen are now the prescription painkiller of choice, provided to nearly 29% of low back pain patients in the ER. Many back pain patients who go to the ER are still getting unnecessary X-rays, results show. About 37% of patients got an X-ray in 2022, about the same proportion as in 2015. The highest rate of X-rays, nearly 44% of cases, occurred in 2021. “We still have some progress to be made in finding ways to encourage appropriate use of X-rays for low back pain,” Kim said. “This is a hard problem to tackle, as the decision to order an X-ray is complex and driven by both clinician and patient factors.”