Media Coverage

How a little more silence in children’s lives helps them grow

“[Young children’s] brains are craving sound-to-meaning connections, so it’s very important that the sounds around them be nourishing and meaningful,” says Nina Kraus, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University.

She believes turning down the noise in our lives starts with embracing — even enjoying — silence.

Suburban Mom With ALS Aims to Raise Awareness For Other Younger Patients

After two months of tests, a mom of three was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. ALS impacts the nerves that control our muscles, causing them to weaken and atrophy. There’s no cure. “It was devastating to realize that our plans for our young family were completely upended by my diagnosis,” Rankin said. Dr. John Coleman, a critical care pulmonologist at Northwestern Medicine and a member of Rankin’s extensive care team, says Rankin is not alone. “I think she is a testament of the younger generation of people who have ALS. ALS has always been kind of thought about as a disease that has affected older people, maybe in their 60s or 70s, but we’re seeing more and more young people being diagnosed with ALS,” Coleman said.

FDA advisers vote in support of RSV vaccine to protect newborns

The US Food and Drug Administration’s independent vaccine advisers voted Thursday in favor of recommending approval of a new vaccine to prevent infants from respiratory syncytial virus, known as RSV. RSV is the No. 1 reason for child hospitalizations in the US. In a single year, there are about 34 million episodes of RSV-associated lower respiratory tract infections in children under the age of 5, and about 10% need to go to the hospital for treatment, studies show. Nearly 80% of children hospitalized with RSV before age 2 had no underlying medical conditions, the FDA said in its presentation to the committee Thursday. Once at the hospital, most kids improve with supportive care, but there is no specific drug to treat RSV. In some cases, the infection can turn into pneumonia and become deadly. Dr. Bill Muller, an infectious disease physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, said anything that would decrease RSV infections would be a “welcome intervention.” Additionally, “Just decreasing the amount of disease that we see would really be an important advance in pediatric medicine,” said Muller, who is also a professor of pediatrics at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Study reveals toll of being Black in in U.S.: 1.6 million excess deaths over 22 years

Research has long shown that Black people live sicker lives and die younger than white people. Now a new study, published Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA, casts the nation’s racial inequalities in stark relief, finding that the higher mortality rate among Black Americans resulted in 1.63 million excess deaths relative to white Americans over more than two decades. High mortality rates among Black people have less to do with genetics than with the country’s long history of discrimination, which has undermined educational, housing and job opportunities for generations of Black people, said Dr. Clyde Yancy, an author of the study and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Black neighborhoods that were red-lined in the 1930s — designated too “high risk” for mortgages and other investments — remain poorer and sicker today, Yancy said. Formerly red-lined ZIP codes also had higher rates of COVID infection and death. “It’s very clear that we have an uneven distribution of health,” Yancy said. “We’re talking about the freedom to be healthy.”

Hot flashes are a disruptive part of menopause

Most women, 80% will experience hot flashes as they reach perimenopause, and they can last anywhere from seven to 10 years. But there are several treatment options available that work to reduce hot flashes, including the newly FDA approved treatment Veozah (fezolinetant). While many might think that hot flashes are simply part of being a woman, they are linked to serious health conditions. “Our temperature control happens in the thermal regulatory zone in the brain and essentially there’s a number of mechanisms that keep the thermal regulatory zone functioning and one of them are these neurons, KNDy neurons, NK 3 neurons,” Dr. Lauren Streicher, a professor at Northwestern University, and host of “Dr. Streicher’s Inside Information: The Menopause Podcast,” tells TODAY.com. “One of the pathways that controls the KNDy neurons is estrogen. So, when you lose your estrogen, you lost that control factor.” When estrogen drops, the KNDy neurons “become hypertrophic” and “go into overdrive.” They stop working as well and fail to regulate body temperature correctly. Though there are multiple pathways that contribute to body temperature, which could explain why some do not experience hot flashes, Streicher says.