A 2026 PRISMA-compliant systematic review and meta-analysis in Drug and Alcohol Review consolidated 30 publications covering 202 prevalence estimates from 120,041 South African adolescents: pooled lifetime prevalence was 35.09% for alcohol use, 25.47% for tobacco use, and 10.47% for cannabis use.1 Research Highlights 30 publications, 202 estimates: pooled data covered 120,041 South African adolescents. Alcohol …
A 2025 longitudinal analysis of 1,528 older Chinese Americans by Chen et al. in the Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease says something more specific than “stress causes Alzheimer’s”: it isn’t the count of stressors that tracks memory decline — it’s a latent trait the authors call stress internalization, a bundle of high perceived stress, …
Statins do not look like a dementia-prevention drug, but they do not look like a dementia hazard either. In 322,358 Kaiser Permanente Northern California patients followed for an average of 11.8 years, dementia diagnoses rose right after statins were started, then flattened: after the first year, the hazard ratio for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias …
A 2026 PRISMA systematic review by Cavallo et al. in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience aggregates 43 neuroimaging studies of social cognition in adults with stroke or traumatic brain injury and finds the same handful of regions implicated again and again: the insula, cingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and corpus callosum.1 Research Highlights Stroke/TBI social-cognition …
Cognitive impairment in first-episode schizophrenia (FES) is the symptom that does the most work blocking employment, relationships, and independent living — and the symptom current antipsychotics barely move. A 2026 RCT by Hu et al. in Psychological Medicine tested whether 20 sessions of low-frequency rTMS targeting the right orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) could improve cognition where …
The broad cytokine story failed its most direct community test: in 972 adults, depression, alcohol use, and alcohol use disorder (AUD) were not associated with C-reactive protein (CRP) or a pre-registered pro-inflammatory cytokine index. The only multiple-testing-corrected cytokine hits ran opposite the hypothesis — AUD was linked to lower IL-1β, IL-4, IL-10, and IL-12 — …
A 2026 Australian interview study involving 27 adults with methamphetamine use problems found that 21 participants, or 77.8%, had never previously sought treatment for methamphetamine use. Research Highlights Most had never sought treatment: Peart et al. interviewed 27 adults and found that 77.8% had not previously sought methamphetamine treatment before entering the parent trial.1 3 …