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.
-
ABC News
–
Girls’ mental health suffered the most during pandemic, data shows
Four years since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, new data shows how severely the pandemic impacted young people’s mental health, particularly girls. During the pandemic, there was an increase in severe emergency room psychiatric visits for children and teens, including for conditions like bipolar disorder, substance abuse disorders, and schizophrenia, according to research published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine. “We observed a unique vulnerability for girls during the pandemic, which indicates that girls’ mental health requires more attention,” the study’s lead author, Jennifer Hoffmann, MD, MS, emergency medicine physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, said in a statement. In the last months of 2021, the U.S. surgeon general described the pandemic’s impact on youth mental health as “devastating,” and organizations representing child psychiatrists, pediatricians and children’s hospitals declared a national emergency for youth mental health.
-
TODAY
–
‘Soaking through my sheets’: What it’s like grappling with menopause in your 20s and 30s
According to the U.S. Health and Human Service’s Office on Women’s Health, the average age of menopause is 52 in the United States. Early menopause occurs before age 45 and premature menopause occurs before 40, the agency says. Both early and premature menopause occur for the same reasons, including family history, smoking, chemotherapy, pelvic radiation, surgical removal of the ovaries, hysterectomies or other health conditions. While research on women’s health lags, there’s still enough evidence for experts to know that starting menopause early can contribute to health problems later. “There’s huge huge medical repercussions,” Lauren Streicher, a certified menopause practitioner and clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, tells TODAY.com. “They are, in most cases, more than twice as likely to develop a long-term medical issue than someone who goes through menopause at the predictable time, particularly when we look at heart disease.” For people who can take hormone replacement therapy, Streicher says “there’s consensus in the medical community” that they should be taking it.
-
TIME
–
What It Means if You Have Borderline High Cholesterol—And What to Do About It
Almost 25 million adults in the U.S. have high cholesterol, which puts them at a higher risk for a heart attack or stroke in the next decade. But a much bigger portion have what’s called borderline high cholesterol, an in-between place that’s not quite high, but not quite within a normal range. High cholesterol is defined as having a total cholesterol number of 240 mg/dL or above. Someone has borderline cholesterol, meanwhile, when their total cholesterol is in the 200 to 239 range. “We create these thresholds—which are admittedly somewhat artificial—to classify people so we can understand if we need to do further analysis or assessment to understand their risk for cardiovascular disease,” says Donald Lloyd-Jones, MD, past president of the American Heart Association and a professor of cardiology and the chair of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. There’s some flexibility: Some people may be completely healthy with a total cholesterol level of 235, while others could be at risk at 205. It depends on a person’s other risk factors. But broadly speaking, these thresholds help doctors make decisions about patient care. People with total cholesterol levels below 200 tend to have a lower risk of developing heart disease, while those over 240 have a higher risk. Those who land from 200 to 239 are somewhere in the middle, Lloyd-Jones says.
-
US News & World Report
–
Doctor Gets First U.S. Lung-Liver Transplant for Advanced Lung Cancer
Gibbon calls the landmark surgery his “Triple L” — two lungs and a liver. “To our knowledge, this is the first known case in the nation where a patient with advanced lung cancer has successfully received a combined lung-liver transplant,” said Ankit Bharat, MD, chief of thoracic surgery and director of the Northwestern Medicine Canning Thoracic Institute. Bharat performed Gibbon’s lung transplant. Northwestern University offers a first-of-its-kind clinical program called Double Lung Replacement and Multidisciplinary Care (DREAM), and Gibbon turned to doctors there to save his life. Surgeons implanted the new lungs first, while the donor liver was kept alive outside the body thanks to a machine that pumps warm, oxygenated and nutrient-enriched blood through the organ — a technology the docs call “liver in a box.” “This DREAM program is new territory for transplantation and the fact that I could experience it and have a wonderful outcome makes me feel so blessed,” Gibbon said. “I wouldn’t be here today without Northwestern Medicine.”
-
Crain’s Chicago Business
–
Age isn’t driving up maternal mortality numbers, Northwestern research finds
Researchers cannot chalk up increases in the maternal mortality rate to an advancing age of women getting pregnant, a Northwestern researcher says. A study of pregnancy-related deaths by a team including Sadiya Khan, associate professor of cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, found that maternal mortality from 2014 and 2021 increased among every age group, disproving the widely believed hypothesis that the problem stems from more people having children later in life. Khan’s study, published March 18 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that the Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) in the United States increased significantly from 16.5 per 100,000 live births in 2014 to 31.8 in 2021. The near doubling of the rate in that period was taken from online publicly available U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Control’s Wonder databases. “Maternal mortality rates are higher in the U.S. than in most other high-income countries and have increased substantially in recent years, yet the majority of these deaths are preventable.” the study states.
-
New York Times
–
Choosing to Skip Sex and Go Straight to I.V.F.
In February, in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F., was thrown into the spotlight when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in the state should be considered children. The decision led to a pause on I.V.F. procedures in parts of the state, and even a pause on shipping embryos out of state, to avoid potential criminal liability. I.V.F., however, is hardly guaranteed to be successful: The procedure still has a risk of miscarriage, though the likelihood is lower because the embryos have been genetically tested and only the most viable are typically implanted. “The vast majority of people who are doing it are truly desperate and have a medical reason for doing it,” said Tarun Jain, MD, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University. “It is a very challenging, time-consuming, physically and emotionally draining process, and a big financial burden if your insurance doesn’t cover it.”
-
NBC 5 Chicago
–
Doctor offers insight on Princess Kate’s cancer diagnosis: Findings, treatment, prognosis and more
Kate, the Princess of Wales, revealed Friday she had been diagnosed with cancer in a stunning announcement following weeks of speculation about her health and whereabouts. Following news of the cancer diagnosis, NBC Chicago talked to Yazan Numan, MD, an oncologist with Northwestern Medicine, who touched on the likelihood of cancer being found during surgery, cancer treatment and a possible prognosis. Numan explained that getting diagnosed with cancer at an early age — like 42 years old in Kate’s case — is not very common but does happen. While it’s unclear where cancer was discovered, similar findings have been made during gallbladder surgeries for cystitis and appendectomies, the doctor said. “…She did say it’s a major abdominal surgery, so hard to speculate, but sometimes it could be due to some sort of a complication that was happening… Whether it’s like an interrupted infection or a bleeding, because of some sort of a perforation in her bowels or her stomach,” Numan said. “And once they went into operate, they did find the cancer and they had to deal with it after the fact.”
-
CNN
–
If antidepressants are killing your sex life, here’s what you can do
You’ve started taking an antidepressant, and it’s helping you to finally feel like life is worth living or that you can stop avoiding your friends’ texts. All seems right in the world — until the moment you realize your sex life has taken a hit. Some people lose their libido or ability to become aroused, while others have problems with genital sensitivity, genital lubrication, reaching orgasm or having satisfying orgasms, or ejaculation. Others experience more than one symptom, said Lauren Streicher, MD, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. Streicher is also the founding medical director of the Northwestern Medicine Center for Sexual Medicine and Menopause. “The ripple effect is very, very significant,” Streicher said, sometimes causing low self-esteem, more depression or anxiety, anger or frustration. The science behind antidepressant-induced sexual dysfunction boils down to a few things: your neurotransmitters, blood flow and muscular system, all of which are controlled by the brain — “the most important sex organ,” Streicher said.
-
New York Times
–
How to Recognize the Most Common Form of Skin Cancer
Basal cell carcinoma is the most common form of skin cancer, but it can be easy to miss, or mistake for another skin issue. While it can be difficult for patients to identify, basal cell carcinoma — which is estimated to affect several million people in the United States each year — is very treatable. Here’s what to know about causes, prevention and treatment. Basal cell carcinomas are common in the areas of the body most exposed to the sun: typically the head, face, neck and arms, said Paras P Vakharia, MD, an assistant professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Most of the time, the lesions are “pink and pearly,” he said. “They almost look a little bit shiny,” he said. Basal cell carcinoma grows slowly, but it’s important to address the disease as soon as possible, doctors said. If the carcinoma is very small, it can be treated with a chemotherapy cream, Dr. Vakharia said. However, Dr. Vakharia said that a diagnosis of basal cell carcinoma should be a clear sign to patients that “they need to be more cautious with sun exposure.” He encouraged people to wear broad-brimmed hats that fully shield the face from UV rays and to use sunscreen with at least SPF 30 protection. Reapply sunscreen if you’re outside for an extended period of time, he added.
-
TIME
–
How to Stop Procrastinating at Bedtime and Actually Go to Sleep
This phenomenon is so universal that there’s a scientific name for it: “bedtime procrastination.” According to the researchers who coined it in a 2014 study, bedtime procrastination is “failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so.” We often delay sleep because we want to regain the control—and time—we lost during the day. But here’s the paradox: Instead of getting more control over our days, bedtime procrastinators end up sabotaging them. Using something that gives us a little hit of dopamine, like our phones, makes us (falsely) feel like we’re delaying the stress of the following day, says Sheehan Fisher, PhD, a perinatal clinical psychologist at Northwestern Medicine who works primarily with new parents. “One thing about sleep is that once you’re unconscious, you wake up to the next day,” he says.
