On June 5, the Ambassador Board of the Digestive Health Foundation at Northwestern Medicine hosted the first live event held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago since the COVID-19 pandemic hit over a year ago. With in-person attendance of 220 and additional supporters participating virtually via livestream, the DHF’s Together on the Terrace: An Evening of Art, Appetizers and Spirits, Al Fresco raised $1.3 million, bringing the total sum raised by DHF since its inception in 2015 to nearly $15 million. Held outdoors at the museum’s Anne and John Kern Terrace Garden a block from the Magnificent Mile, the event enabled the board to continue vital fundraising in the face of COVID restrictions that cancelled the foundation’s annual gala for the second consecutive year. The evening featured mixology demonstrations and tastings, wine tasting, live music by the TVK Orchestra, and museum tours as well as silent and live auctions and raffle prizes. Auction highlights included Ryder Cup tickets, a trip to New York City with VIP tickets to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and dinner prepared by Michelin-starred chef Soo Ahn, who will helm the kitchen at the highly anticipated Italian restaurant Adalina scheduled to open on the Gold Coast this month. FOX 32 Chicago’s Sylvia Perez kicked off the event as well as the livestream. Event proceeds will benefit digestive disease research as well as supporting the DHF Ambassador Board’s commitment to promoting greater equity in access to medical care and education through two projects. They include the new Digestive Health Foundation MCAT Prep Program created in partnership with the I Am Abel Foundation to provide funding, resources...
Post-traumatic stress is a chronic psychological reaction to an event where a person experiences extreme fear or anxiety due to actual or perceived threat to life or bodily harm. It is usually thought of in other groups like combat veterans or crime victims. Trauma from medical experiences is less studied and the study team, a partnership between Northwestern and Rush Universities and led by Dr. Tiffany Taft and Dr. Stephen Hanauer, is the first to study PTS in IBD patients living in the United States. Between 25% and 30% of IBD patients report clinically significant symptoms of PTS which include nightmares, flashbacks, feeling on edge, mood changes and avoidance behaviors. Chronic PTS likely partially explains poor outcomes in some patients, including worse disease activity, more hospitalizations and higher healthcare utilization. It is likely many IBD patients are living with chronic PTS and go undiagnosed. The DHF funded research on post-traumatic stress symptoms in patients with IBD, published in the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Journal in June 2021 (https://academic.oup.com/ibdjournal/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/ibd/izab152/6301664), is the first large-scale study of medical trauma due to experiences related to Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Almost 800 patients from the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation IBD Partners database participated. This study will bring awareness to IBD physicians, nurses, and psychologists to screen patients for this condition more frequently. The next steps are to identify preventive strategies and safe treatments for IBD-related PTS. Based on the findings of this DHF grant the study team has submitted a larger research project grant (R01) to the National Institutes of Health to test an established psychological treatment for PTS delivered via telemedicine in a...
