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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CBS News Chicago
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Northwestern Medicine shares new findings from ongoing COVID study
Northwestern Medicine has released new findings in an ongoing study of long COVID. Northwestern has been studying patients at its Comprehensive COVID-19 Center since May 2020. More than 1,800 patients have been evaluated. Researchers found, among those tested, 85% reported decreased quality of life, 51% said they had cognitive impairment, 45% had altered lung function, 83% had abnormal CT chest scans, and 12% had elevated heart rate on rhythm monitoring. Those who reported cognitive impairment or lung issues were most often patients who were hospitalized by COVID-19. Long COVID occurs in about a third of COVID survivors and is now the third leading neurologic disorder in the United States.
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Yahoo! News
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A 33-year-old who got light-headed at the gym tried to push through it. He was having a stroke.
A 33-year-old man told himself he could push through is workout when he felt light-headed in a workout class. Instructors called an ambulance, and by the time paramedics arrived he had lost control of his left arm and leg, and couuldn’t stand up by himself. Doctors at Northwestern Medicine confirmed he was having a stroke and performed emergency surgery to remove a blood clot that was blocking blood flow into the right side of his brain. ests revealed the man had an aneurysm — which is a bulge in a blood vessel caused by a weakness in its wall — in his aorta, the main artery that carries blood away from your heart to the rest of your body. “We did find an aortic aneurysm that would have otherwise been undetected in his lifetime, and undetected aneurysms continue to grow and ultimately cause a dissection or rupture which is catastrophic,” one of his doctors, Dr. S. Christopher Malaisrie, said in a news release.
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TODAY
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FDA approves first over-the-counter birth control pill in the US
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the oral contraceptive Opill for over-the-counter sales, making it the first hormonal contraceptive pill available in the U.S. without a prescription. The approval marks a major win for medical groups, including the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which have been pushing for years for an over-the-counter birth control pill. It also comes amid legal battles over women’s reproductive rights. “This is a monumental decision,” said Dr. Melissa Simon, a professor of clinical gynecology at Northwestern University. “OTC birth control is available in over 100 countries, so we’ve been behind in availing safe, effective such as this oral contraceptive pill to individuals who are trying to avoid pregnancy.” Ultimately, the FDA committee agreed most women could determine on their own whether the medication was appropriate for them to use.
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Northwestern Medicine filling in the blanks on long COVID
The directors of Northwestern Medicine’s Comprehensive COVID-19 Center have discovered that the predominant population of patients suffering from long COVID-19 syndrome are largely white women in their 40s who were not hospitalized with COVID and are suffering cognitive impairment and decreased quality of life. Still there’s not a one-size-fits-all set of symptoms or treatments among long COVID patients, says Dr. Marc A. Sala, co-director of the center and one of the nation’s first doctors to provide specific research into the new syndrome. With about a third of the 100 million people in the U.S. who came down with COVID suffering long-lasting symptoms like brain fog, shortness of breath, chest pain and a wide variety of other symptoms, there remains a significant demand for patient appointments, said Dr. Igor Koralnik, the other co-director of the center. “To date, we’ve treated nearly 4,000 patients from 44 states at the (center), and our team of 42 clinicians continue to see approximately 100 patients each month,” Koralnik, chief of neuroinfectious diseases and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine, said in a previous statement. “The disease burden of long COVID continues to grow in this country with significant implications for the economy and population health.”
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TIME
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Pence Would Ban Abortions When Pregnancies Aren’t Viable. His GOP Rivals Won’t Say if They Agree
In a Republican presidential field full of candidates opposed to abortion rights, Mike Pence stands out in his embrace of the cause. He has advocated pulling from the market a widely used abortion pill that has a better safety record than penicillin and Viagra. In a recent interview, Pence went even further, saying abortion should be banned when a pregnancy isn’t viable. Such a standard would force women to carry pregnancies to term even when doctors have determined there is no chance a baby will survive outside the womb. “One of the things that you cannot understate is the difficulty for a woman to carry a nonviable pregnancy,” said Alan Peaceman, MD, professor emeritus of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “It is psychological torture to go out in the world, for people to see your pregnancy — and people will come up to you and want to talk about your pregnancy. And that puts the woman in a terrible position that nobody should be in unless they chose to be in that position.”
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USA Today
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33-year-old stroke survivor recalls 1st symptoms he almost ignored
A stroke occurs when a blood clot in another part of the body, such as the heart, breaks off and makes its way to the brain. There, the clot can restrict blood flow, causing symptoms such as the weakness and loss of vision that McKeown experienced. It’s not unusual for people having a stroke to miss the first signs, like weakness on the left side of the body, Dr. Ali Shaibani, chief of neurointerventional radiology at Northwestern Medicine and part of McKeown’s medical team, said.
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Crain’s Chicago Business
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Two advancing heart devices: Abbott’s dual-chamber pacemaker and NU’s dissolvable imaging monitor
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.
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Chicago Tribune
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Women with opioid use disorder face stigma in getting help, seeking treatment
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.
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US News & World Report
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FDA Gives Full Approval to Alzheimer’s Drug Leqembi
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.
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The Washington Post
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What you need to know about freezing your eggs
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.
