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 …
A 2026 Molecular Psychiatry study found that RVI-AD, a structural-MRI score measuring how closely a person’s brain anatomy matches an Alzheimer’s disease pattern, predicted mild-cognitive-impairment conversion to dementia most strongly over the next 3 years: OR 2.16, 95% CI 1.81-2.57, p < 2e-16, AUC 0.70.1 Research Highlights Short-term conversion signal: in 965 ADNI participants with …
A 2026 analysis of 174 people with non-affective first-episode psychosis found that cognitive reserve was tied to 3 signals available near illness onset: age at onset, family history of psychosis, and polygenic liability for educational attainment. Adding the education polygenic score raised the model’s adjusted R² from 13.5% to 17.7%, a real but modest gain …
A 2026 Nature Neuroscience study found that lecanemab cleared amyloid in a humanized-microglia Alzheimer’s disease model only when microglia and the antibody’s intact Fc fragment were both present: X-34 plaque area differed across IgG1, lecanemab, and Fc-silenced LALA-PG groups (P = 0.0003), 82E1 plaque area differed across groups (P < 0.0001), and microglia-deficient mice showed …
A 2026 fMRI study of 1,006 healthy young adults found that emotional pictures were remembered better than neutral pictures, but the brain signal split after arousal was modeled: amygdala and insula effects dropped out, while negative and positive valence kept separate cortical encoding patterns.1 Research Highlights Emotional pictures had the recall advantage: in the full …
Auditory targeted memory reactivation during a 2-hour nap did not improve motor retention in 20 Parkinson’s disease patients or 20 healthy older adults, even though the same cues changed sleep physiology by reducing spindle density and increasing slow-wave density.1 Research Highlights First Parkinson’s TMR test: Micca et al. studied 20 Parkinson’s disease patients and 20 …
A 2026 eLife study recorded 3,881 lateral orbitofrontal cortex units in rats and found that prior cocaine use made the OFC over-distinguish task positions that controls treated as functionally equivalent. The headline result was not gross task failure: cocaine-experienced rats still performed the odor task, but their OFC ensembles showed higher S1-vs.-S2 decoding than sucrose …