A 2026 medRxiv genetic analysis linked type 2 diabetes and 2-hour postprandial glucose — the blood-sugar rise after an oral glucose challenge — to higher lacunar stroke risk, with a stronger direct signal for post-meal glucose than for HbA1c after adjustment for brain small-vessel imaging markers.1 Research Highlights Lacunar stroke was the clearest endpoint: genetically …
A 91-player adolescent football preprint mapped head-impact-related cortical slowing onto brain receptor and gene-expression maps: concussion-related slowing aligned with norepinephrine transporter density, r = 0.43, and alpha-4 beta-2 nicotinic receptor density, r = 0.50, while aligning inversely with dopamine D2, BDNF, and APOE maps.1 The result is a mechanistic clue about where head-impact physiology may …
A 2025 paper by Gu et al. in Molecular Psychiatry — the largest study of its kind — finds that higher common-variant genetic risk for autism predicts lower cortical neurite density in 31,748 UK Biobank adults and 4,928 ABCD children.1 The effect is small in absolute terms but replicates across cohorts and methods. Research Highlights …
A 2026 Parkinson’s disease study used gene-expression data and genome-scale metabolic modeling to predict patient-level metabolite patterns, then separated 104 patients into 3 metabolic subgroups that were partly reproduced in an independent 81-patient validation dataset. Research Highlights Patient-level modeling found heterogeneity: Abdik et al. predicted secretion tendencies for 802 analyzable metabolites across 104 postmortem substantia …
A 2026 review argued that G protein-coupled receptor 30 may connect estrogen signaling, trigeminal pain pathways, and migraine biology, but migraine-specific human trials of GPR30-targeted drugs are still missing. Research Highlights The migraine rationale is hormone-linked: women have roughly 2 to 3 times the migraine prevalence of men, and 50% to 60% of women with …
A 2026 mouse and cell study found that ATP11B loss pushed aged brains toward hippocampal iron accumulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, neuronal ferroptosis, and worse memory behavior than wild-type comparison mice; ATP11B overexpression then improved multiple learning and memory tests in 18-month-old mice. Research Highlights Memory signal: ATP11B-deficient mice performed worse than wild-type mice on Morris water …
A 2026 medRxiv preprint used 68 NeuroMark SPECT components to analyze 2,746 psychiatric patient scans and 76 controls, linking depression-related worry/rumination and social disinterest to brain-network patterns.1 This preprint is useful as a large biomarker-generating map, but the clinical-diagnostic claim needs much more caution than the sample size alone suggests. Research Highlights Large clinical SPECT …