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 study by Bai et al. in Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience uses Mendelian randomization (MR) — inherited genetic variants as a natural experiment to test causality — and concludes that migraines causally lower cognitive performance in a Han Chinese sample.1 The headline conclusion is plausible; the effect-size numbers in the popular MR shorthand (odds …
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 …
An Ethiopian umbrella review estimated perinatal depressive symptoms at 22.49% across 8 systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Antenatal and postnatal rates were similar, so the burden spans the whole perinatal window rather than clustering only after delivery.1 Research Highlights Overall pooled prevalence was 22.49%: Necho et al. combined 8 Ethiopian systematic reviews and meta-analyses covering 28 …
A Global Burden of Disease analysis estimated that U.S. age-standardized substance-use disorder disability-adjusted life-year rates rose 213.5% from 1990 to 2019, with opioid use disorders producing the steepest increase and the largest state-level burden.1 Research Highlights U.S. cases rose sharply: prevalent substance-use disorder cases increased from 12.6 million in 1990 to 19.5 million in 2019.1 …
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 …