Topic: Health

Increasingly, sports teams, especially in the NBA, are hiring "sleep coaches" to help players. This follows research that good sleep can be as beneficial as performance-enhancing drugs.

For decades, public health advocates have pushed for limits on smoking. They've included warning labels on products to limits on where someone can light up, all of which have helped bring down smoking rates. But in Illinois, a push to raise the smoking age has repeatedly failed to become law. We took a look at this year's push, and what chance it has at becoming law.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Prairie Research Institute have found tiny strands of synthetic fabric, or microfibers, in Illinois groundwater systems. 

On The 21st: In the 1940s, the Montford Point Marines fought in World War II and were the first African-American marines. Today, some of those veterans live in Chicago, and for decades they’ve relied on a local veterans center that’s now at risk of closing. Plus, Chicagoan Brian Wallach was diagnosed with ALS more than a year ago, and he’s spending his time trying to raise 100 million dollars to help find a cure for future generations.

A second case of measles has been reported in Champaign-Urbana. Like the first case announced in January, this second case involves a member of the University of Illinois campus community.

Before Tim Landis died a year ago, there had been little indication he had heart disease. He’d had an active lifestyle and ate a healthy diet. But an autopsy revealed he had had years of untreated high blood pressure. His widow, Debra Landis, wrote a first-person account of losing Tim and her investigation into the disease that took his life.

A settlement was reached with Illinois inmates in 2016, when the state agreed to revamp mental health care and provide better treatment. But a federal judge has ruled that care remains “grossly insufficient” and “extremely poor.” The agency has not hired enough mental health staff to provide care to everyone who needs it, and inmates will mental illness suffer as they continue to wait for long-overdue treatment.

As suicide and opioid death numbers climb, researchers investigate how strong a connection exists.

Across the United States, an alarming number of women die during pregnancy or childbirth. And for each one who dies, dozens wind up with health problems that can last for years. Now women are being encouraged to watch what happens in the "fourth trimester."

Gov.-elect J.B. Pritzker takes office next week on the heels of the most decisive election victory in a generation. And he’ll be working to pass his agenda through the biggest Democratic majorities in the General Assembly since the 1960s.