TL;DR: A 2026 review in BMC Psychiatry found 441 primary MRI and electroencephalogram (EEG), a scalp recording of brain electrical activity, mental-health biomarker studies, but most were small, cross-sectional, and concentrated in depression, making routine clinical use premature. Key Findings 58,824 records screened: Researchers searched MEDLINE and Embase from 2010 to September 2023, then mapped …
TL;DR: A 2022 study in Nature Communications used non-contrast 3D T2-FLAIR MRI, a scan that suppresses ordinary cerebrospinal-fluid brightness, to map possible brain-border drainage routes toward cervical lymph nodes, but FLAIR brightness alone does not prove lymph flow. Key Findings 81 clinical MRI scans supplied the human map: The retrospective cohort included 45 females and …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring found that each 10% higher energy share from ultra-processed foods was associated with lower attention scores and higher modifiable dementia-risk scores in 2,192 dementia-free Australian adults. Key Findings A dementia-free midlife sample anchored the analysis: the Healthy Brain Project included 2,192 Australians …
TL;DR: A 2026 randomized-trial preprint in medRxiv reported that 10 minutes of daily digital meditation reduced anxiety and mind wandering, with the largest gains in people who started with higher symptom burden. Key Findings Ten daily minutes reduced anxiety: Meditation-naive adults were assigned to immediate training or waitlist control in a delayed-intervention design. Low-dose protocol: …
TL;DR: A county-level 2026 study in PLOS One found that warmer monthly temperatures in the United States from 2013 to 2024 were associated with higher police-violence death rates, with projected additional deaths by 2050 under high-emissions climate scenarios. Key Findings 2013-2024 county-level data: Researchers linked U.S. police-violence deaths with monthly temperature and precipitation data across …
TL;DR: A 2025 systematic review in Translational Psychiatry found that substance use disorder was associated with recurring resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI), a scan of spontaneous brain-network communication, abnormalities in reward and self-control circuits across 53 studies. Key Findings 53-study meta-analysis: Researchers pooled whole-brain rs-fMRI studies covering 1,700 people with substance use disorder and 1,792 healthy …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in PLOS Medicine found that severe infections stayed linked to later dementia in Finland even after researchers accounted for a broad set of noninfectious comorbid diseases. Key Findings 62,555 dementia cases: The analysis matched Finnish adults diagnosed with late-onset dementia from 2017 to 2020 against 312,772 dementia-free controls. 29 prior hospital …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint on schizophrenia reported that illness insight tracked with resting-state functional MRI (fMRI) flexibility, a measure of how dynamically brain regions reconfigure their connectivity, and that these brain-dynamics patterns aligned with dopamine D2 and serotonin 5-HT2A receptor maps after accounting for antipsychotic receptor occupancy. Key Findings Two insight subtypes: Clinical clustering …
TL;DR: A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis in Molecular Neurobiology found that plasma phosphorylated tau 217 (p-tau217), a blood marker of Alzheimer-linked tau pathology, identified biomarker-defined Alzheimer’s disease with pooled sensitivity of 85.4% and specificity of 88.0% across 27 studies. Key Findings 27-study evidence base: Researchers analyzed 19,652 participants from studies that compared plasma p-tau217 …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Science of the Total Environment followed nearly 295,000 Southern California births and linked extreme nighttime heat in early and late pregnancy to higher autism diagnosis by age 5, while daytime heat was not associated. Key Findings A large Southern California cohort anchored the estimate: The retrospective Kaiser Permanente Southern California …
