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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US News & World Report
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Scientists Use Sound to Ease Patients’ Chronic Nightmares
People plagued by frequent nightmares may find relief from hearing a specific sound as they sleep, a new, small study suggests. It’s estimated that about 4% of adults have nightmares that are frequent and distressing enough to impair their sleep and daily functioning. In some cases, the nightmares are related to an underlying condition, like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while others are considered “idiopathic,” or having no known cause. “Most people either think it’s normal to have so many nightmares, or they don’t know there’s treatment available,” said Jennifer Mundt, PhD, a behavioral sleep medicine specialist at Northwestern Medicine and professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. When it comes to nightmare disorder, as it’s officially known, the treatment with the best evidence is imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), Mundt said. With that technique, people work with a therapist to recall their nightmares, change the negative storyline to one with a positive ending, and then rehearse the new script during the day. Research shows that IRT can start to banish people’s nightmares within two to three weeks. While the sound therapy is not yet available in the real world, Mundt said it’s important that nightmare sufferers know there is already effective treatment out there.
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New York Times
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Uterine Cancer Cases Are Rising. Here’s What to Know.
Rates of uterine cancer have been increasing in the United States, particularly for Black and Hispanic women. When we talk about uterine cancer, most of the time, we’re talking about endometrial cancer, which starts in cells that form the lining of the uterus, said Emily Hinchcliff, MD, MPH, assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. The other, much rarer, type of uterine cancer is uterine sarcoma, which develops in the muscles supporting the uterus. Abnormal bleeding is the most common symptom of uterine cancer. For younger women, a change in bleeding pattern — including bleeding between periods and heavy bleeding in general — can be a symptom of uterine cancer. Other early symptoms of uterine cancer include pelvic pain or pressure. Patients might experience bloating or changes in their bowel habits, which could look like constipation or diarrhea, Hinchcliff said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends seeing your doctor if symptoms persist for two weeks or longer.
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WebMD
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The Importance of Starting ART Right Away
Antiretroviral therapy, or ART, is a safe and proven way to treat HIV. You doctor will want you to start right away – usually the same day you’re diagnosed. This is called rapid-start ART. Early and effective treatment can help you live a normal life. It can also lower the chances you’ll pass the virus to someone else. The sooner you start, the better. That’s true even if you feel good. “There’s no upside to waiting,” says Shannon Galvin, MD, associate professor of medicine and infectious diseases at Northwestern Medicine. “Everyone who has HIV will benefit from being on treatment, no matter what their T-cell count is.” Effective ART can lower your viral load so much that blood tests won’t be able to find it. That doesn’t just keep you well. It means there’s pretty much no chance that you’ll sexually transmit the virus to someone else. In the past, doctors gave rapid-start ART to people with a very low CD4 count. But now, anyone with HIV is likely to get it. “We have hard data that shows everybody (with HIV) lives longer and healthier if they’re on antiretrovirals,” Galvin says. ART is even more important for those that are pregnant, have a low CD4 count or an AIDS-defining condition.
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CBS
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FDA plans new regulations on mammograms in effort to help women with dense breasts
Mammograms can sometimes fail to detect tumors in women who have a higher breast density. As a result, the FDA said it’s planning new regulations for informing women about their tissue type and screening options. Sarah Friedewald, MD, the chief of breast imaging at Northwestern Medicine, explains that denser breasts have less fat and more tissue. It can be more difficult to spot tumors in dense tissue in mammograms, since both show up as white in the images. “About 40[%] to 50% of the women in the country actually have dense breast tissue. It just makes it a little bit harder for us to find cancer on the mammogram,” Friedewald said. If you’re planning to get a mammogram, it’s important to ask doctors about your tissue type. If additional tests are needed, make sure to get a medical order and check if your insurance company requires pre-approval and covers the cost.
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Researchers Home in on Radiation Treatments Using Gene Mutations
A Northwestern Medicine study identifies common and rare gene mutations that impact radiation resistance and sensitivity, work that could help provide more individualized, effective radiotherapy for cancer patients, the system said in a statement. “The lack of incorporation of genetic data into radiation treatment is a significant unmet clinical need,” corresponding author Mohamed Abazeed, MD, PhD, associate professor of radiation oncology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine radiation oncologist, said. However, researchers developed a computational algorithm and test mutations by placing them in several human cells and assessing the impact on them. “Cancer genomics over the last decade has revolutionized how we treat cancer patients from a drug perspective,” Abazeed, also co-leader of the lung cancer program at Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University, said in the statement. “If you find the right mutation in a patient’s tumor, there are now a host of drugs that can selectively target that mutation and, therefore, that tumor.”
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US News & World Report
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New Omicron Subvariants BQ.1, BQ.1.1 Could Help Fuel Next COVID-19 Surge in US
Since omicron first topped delta to become the dominant strain in the U.S. in December 2021, the variant has stuck around in various forms. Subvariant after subvariant of omicron emerged and rose to dominance, only to be replaced by another in a matter of months. Now, the U.S. is dealing with an alphabet soup of omicron subvariants – BA.5, BA.4.6, BQ.1.1, BQ.1, BF.7, BA.2.75.2, BA.2.75 and BA.4 – as it approaches a potential fall and winter coronavirus wave. It’s unclear if any of the subvariants will rise to dominance as BA.5 declines or if several of them will continue to co-circulate into the winter. With so many strains circulating, even a small advantage could be what drives a subvariant to dominance. “That’s why each of these could potentially be the ones that form the new lineage that dominates,” says Ramon Lorenzo-Redondo, PhD, an assistant professor of medicine in infectious diseases and bioinformatics at Northwestern University. Given that these numbers are low so far – less than 10% of the eligible population has taken an updated booster shot – Lorenzo-Redondo suggests focusing in on populations that are at high-risk for severe COVID-19, like the immunocompromised. Lorenzo-Redondo says that if cases and hospitalizations do start going back up in the U.S., health officials should turn back to mitigation measures known to work, like masks.
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Yahoo! News
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Easy Ways to Improve Your Blood Cholesterol Levels
According to the CDC, 38% of Americans are living with high cholesterol, which is linked to an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. Cholesterol in itself is not a toxic substance—in fact, it performs many vital processes in the human body. But, if there is too much bad cholesterol versus good cholesterol, it can cause serious health issues. One thing to improve cholesterol levels is to not smoke. One study showed that for many smokers, a stroke was the first sign they had of cardiovascular disease. “There is often more awareness and concern about cancer as a result of smoking than heart disease, so we wanted to better define the risks of smoking related to different types of cardiovascular disease and, most importantly, to cardiovascular death,” says Sadiya S. Khan, MD, assistant professor of medicine in the division of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. “In our analysis, even after adjusting for deaths not related to the heart, such as due to lung cancer, we found that fatal or non-fatal events related to cardiovascular disease are more likely to occur among people who smoke. People who smoke may not realize the harm cigarettes are causing their body until it’s too late.”
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The Washington Post
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FDA wants to yank pregnancy drug. Firm argues Black women will suffer.
“Help give your baby more time.” The eye-catching bright pink ads for the drug Makena tout its ability to reduce the risk of preterm birth. Introduced in 2011, it has been seen as a potential miracle drug for women at high risk. The problem: The Food and Drug Administration contends it does not work. As Alan Peaceman, professor emeritus of maternal-fetal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, recalls, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were studies showing that animals given the hormone progesterone could have prolonged pregnancies. He remembers thinking that was a bit “weird” because the amount of the medication being given was “a drop in the ocean given how much progesterone is circulating in the body already.” But as a researcher who was part of a National Institutes of Health maternal-fetal network that ran a clinical trial of 17P, a synthetic form of progesterone given by injection, he was happy and surprised to find that it appeared to reduce the risk of recurrent preterm birth.
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WGN
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Living with ALS for decades: The long struggle and complex questions patients face
ALS is a debilitating and deadly disease with no cure. There are some known genetic markers. The majority of ALS patients, 85 percent, have sporadic disease, meaning there’s no family history. But 15 percent have familial disease – and researchers have identified 30 different genes in which a mutation can be passed down and cause ALS. Some mutations lead to a slow progression, others to a faster course. Gene modifier play a key role. According to Robert Kalb, MD, director of the Les Turner ALS Center and professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of medicine, “There’s something in the background genotype affecting whether the disease will manifest or not and if it does, when it will manifest.” To help answer some of the key questions, Kalb and his team are looking closely at genetically modified worms that are used to model the disease. They’ve identified genetic modifiers that improve their coordination, research supported by the Les Turner ALS Foundation.
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Chicago Tribune
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Another COVID wave could be coming. Here’s how to make your holiday plans.
At this stage in the long slog of the pandemic, many of us are forgoing masks in places we previously wore them and getting together indoors when we had formerly avoided it. But the holidays throw new variables at everyone’s risk calculus. People trek across the country to see each other. Families crowd around dinner tables, with older, more vulnerable people sitting beside their younger relatives. Individual risk tolerance may vary among your family members, but in general, plan around the person at your gathering who is highest-risk. That means taking more precautions if you have a family member who is older than 60, on immunosuppressant medications, received a transplant, or is a cancer patient, said Dr. Michelle Prickett, pulmonary and critical care specialist at Northwestern Medicine.
