A 2026 Nature Neuroscience study from the Igarashi lab proposes a circuit-level answer for why the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) is the first cortical region to falter in Alzheimer’s: dopamine inputs from the VTA and substantia nigra to the LEC go functionally silent at the earliest disease stage in an APP knock-in mouse — before …
Dementia rates in the US, UK, Netherlands, Sweden, France, and several other high-income countries have been falling for decades, despite population aging. The standard explanation — improved cardiovascular care, more education, and less smoking in later-born cohorts — is real but incomplete. Research Highlights Dementia incidence has been falling about 13% per decade in Western …
A human, mouse, and zebrafish study linked long-term chlorpyrifos exposure to Parkinson’s disease risk, with the strongest exposure-duration estimate reaching OR 2.74 for workplace proximity across the 1974-to-index-year window.1 The paper is stronger than a single epidemiology result because animal experiments pointed to dopaminergic neuron loss, microglial activation, pathological α-synuclein, and autophagy dysfunction. Research Highlights …
A 40-rat early-life visceral stress study found auditory pathway sensitization without hearing-threshold loss: neonatal colorectal distension produced IBS-like visceral hypersensitivity, normal ABR thresholds, shortened auditory brainstem latencies, increased amplitudes, and 219 differentially expressed cochlear proteins.1 The result turns IBS-like stress exposure into a gut-pain and sensory-processing question. Research Highlights Visceral hypersensitivity was strong: At 20 …
A 2026 review in the Japanese Journal of Radiology argued that amyloid PET has moved from an optional Alzheimer’s disease biomarker to a practical eligibility gate for anti-amyloid antibody therapy, while tau PET and FDG-PET answer different questions in the same clinical workflow.1 The key shift is not that every memory complaint needs PET; it …
A 2026 systematic review argues that catatonia should be read as a limbic-cortical circuit syndrome, with motor shutdown tied to brain systems for threat, salience, motivation, and emotional regulation. Research Highlights 20 studies met criteria: the 2026 review screened 1,792 records, assessed 54 full texts, and included 20 articles: 13 observational studies and 7 case …
A 2026 iScience study found that both humans and rats could report whether their own 2-second timing responses were small-error or large-error trials, but rats were more accurate on test choices: human accuracy was 55%-57%, rat accuracy was 65%-67%, and the species gap remained significant before task-variable matching.1 Research Highlights Both species monitored timing errors: …