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Levetiracetam After Stroke: 9 Fewer Deaths in Older Adults

MHD featured image for levetiracetam continuation, post-stroke seizure prevention, and 90-day survival in older adults.

A 2026 Medicare target-trial emulation found continued levetiracetam after acute ischemic stroke was associated with 53 vs. 62 deaths per 1,000 over 90 days, a risk difference of −9 deaths per 1,000 favoring continuation. Research Highlights Survival signal: continued levetiracetam after an initial month of post-stroke use was linked to 53 deaths per 1,000 vs. …

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Dysarthria Speech Biomarker Tracked Severity Across 5 Languages

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A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that a training-free speech biomarker tracked dysarthria severity across 890 speakers, 10 corpora, and 5 full-pipeline languages, with all 5 consonant d-prime features showing random-effects correlations with clinical severity (rho = −0.50 to −0.56; all p < 2e−4). Research Highlights Speech-severity signal was broad: Muller et al. evaluated 890 speakers …

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Serum MOG Blood Biomarker Rose During Multiple Sclerosis Relapse

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A 2026 medRxiv case-control study found that serum myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein was 20.5 pg/ml higher in multiple sclerosis than in healthy donors and 15.3 pg/ml higher during relapse than remission, making it a plausible blood marker of demyelination rather than a replacement for neurofilament light chain. Research Highlights MOG was higher in MS: serum myelin …

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Dynamic FDG-PET Signal Quality Beats Static PET in Focal Epilepsy

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A 2026 medRxiv study of 30 adults with drug-resistant focal epilepsy found that dynamic FDG-PET had higher model-adjusted signal quality than static PET in most brain regions, including >80% posterior probability of superiority in 29 of 36 regions. Research Highlights Dynamic PET beat static PET: interictal dynamic FDG-PET showed higher signal quality than static PET …

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Melatonin aMT6s GWAS Found No Hits, PRS Linked to Sleep and Diabetes

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A 2026 multi-ancestry genome-wide association study of urinary aMT6s, a melatonin metabolite used as a proxy for overnight melatonin secretion, found 0 genome-wide significant loci in 11,744 people, even though 23 variants reached suggestive significance and 8 were supported by 2 analytic methods. Research Highlights No common variant dominated: the 2026 GWAS meta-analysis involving 11,744 …

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Medical Cannabis for Chronic Pain: Stress and Sleep Drove Satisfaction

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A 2026 mixed-methods study of 32 chronic non-cancer pain patients found the strongest satisfaction signal when prescribed cannabis-based medicines affected stress, sleep, coping, anxiety, appetite, and daily function — not pain intensity alone.1 Research Highlights 32 patients were interviewed: Pombeiro Stein et al. studied adults from a German pain clinic who had used physician-prescribed cannabis-based …

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