TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that older adults with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA)-defined mild cognitive impairment had less coordinated pulse-wave responses during a cognitive challenge than cognitively intact older adults. Key Findings Community cognitive-aging sample: The southern Taiwan dataset included 101 older adults: 12 reference participants, 50 people in a MoCA-defined mild cognitive impairment …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in PLOS One found that people with Parkinson’s disease made more silent pauses while reading aloud, especially when sentences were longer or syntactically more complex. Key Findings Reading task compared 71 adults: Researchers compared 32 people with Parkinson’s disease and 39 older control participants. Parkinson’s readers paused more often: The Parkinson’s …
TL;DR: A 2026 preprint in medRxiv used electroencephalography (EEG), a scalp electrical-activity recording method, and electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings to test whether brain-heart interplay, meaning coupling between brain-network organization and cardiac autonomic activity, tracks aging, Parkinson’s disease, cognitive screening scores, and freezing of gait. Key Findings Three datasets: Researchers analyzed resting EEG-ECG data from healthy young …
TL;DR: A 2026 mouse study in Cell found that olfactory receptor neurons, the smell-sensing cells in the nose, were arranged in spatial bands that lined up with matching sensory maps in the brain’s olfactory bulb. Key Findings Organized receptor bands: Researchers found that odor receptor neurons were not randomly scattered across the mouse nose; receptor …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience found that lower frontal midline theta, an EEG marker of cognitive-control engagement, partly explained why young adults with higher negative emotionality performed worse on a Go/No-Go inhibition task. Key Findings 106 young adults completed EEG testing: U.S. Army National Guard recruits performed a Go/No-Go task …
TL;DR: A 2026 Nature Communications paper introduced CAptVE, a fluorescent aptamer method that labels molecular features in mouse brain tissue while preserving ultrastructure for electron-microscopy connectomics. Key Findings Detergent-free labeling: CAptVE used slow off-rate modified aptamers to label brain cells without detergent permeabilization that can disrupt ultrastructure. Three fixation steps: The optimized pipeline balanced fluorescence …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that a composite cerebral small vessel disease (cCSVD) score from routine T1 MRI predicted 3-month cognitive recovery after stroke better than any single small-vessel marker in a 65-person cohort. Key Findings Recovery window: The study analyzed 65 early subacute stroke survivors who completed baseline and 90-day follow-up visits. MRI …
TL;DR: A 2026 mouse and cell study in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy linked ATP11B, a phospholipid-flipping transport protein, to hippocampal iron handling, mitochondrial failure, ferroptosis, and age-related cognitive decline. Key Findings ATP11B fell with brain aging: Older mice showed lower blood-brain-barrier tight-junction markers and ATP11B emerged from integrated aging, endothelial-cell, and transport-gene analyses. ATP11B …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Journal of Medical Case Reports described a 71-year-old breast-cancer survivor whose Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a cognitive screening test, increased from 16 to 20 and whose 15-item Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-15), a depression-symptom questionnaire, decreased from 8 to 2 after 12 sessions of left DLPFC, a prefrontal executive-control region, transcranial …
TL;DR: A 2026 systematic review in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience found that stroke and traumatic brain injury populations showed consistent social cognition alterations across domains, while insula, cingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and corpus callosum were repeatedly implicated. Key Findings Study type: a PRISMA-guided systematic review of social cognition domains after stroke and traumatic …
