Semaglutide is not close to being an approved cocaine-use-disorder medication, but a 2026 rat study gives the idea a more demanding preclinical test than ordinary self-administration experiments. After 5 days of treatment, rats shifted away from cocaine choice without losing total operant responding, which separates the result from a broad appetite-suppression artifact. Research Highlights Semaglutide …
A 2026 cross-species metabolism study found that eutylone, a synthetic cathinone stimulant sometimes sold as a “bath salt” or MDMA-like drug, inactivated CYP2D6 with Ki = 4.2 μM, kinact = 0.069 min-1, and inactivation efficiency = 1.64 x 10-2 min-1 μM-1 — a range the researchers described as comparable to MDMA. Research Highlights CYP2D6 was …
A 2026 Taiwanese case series reported VAS pain drops in all 3 adults treated with pregabalin for type I complex regional pain syndrome: 9 to 5, 2 to 1, and 6 to 3 after doses of 75-150 mg/day. The signal is clinically interesting because pain relief helped rehabilitation participation, but the evidence remains weak because …
A 2026 case series of 10 adults with refractory postherpetic neuralgia found: 3 of 8 patients responded to a spinal cord stimulation trial, 2 kept meaningful 24-month relief after implantation, and 3 dorsal root entry zone lesioning cases reported 60-90% pain relief at 24 months.1 The data are too small to rank the procedures, but …
A 2026 iScience study found that adults could learn a new auditory cue to visual depth after about 1 hour, but full perceptual integration did not appear reliably at the group level: only 31 of 63 participants, or 49%, gained precision when the novel cue was combined with familiar visual disparity.1 The sharp interpretation separates …
A 2026 NHANES mortality analysis found that adults with PHQ-9 depressive symptoms had lower long-term all-cause mortality when their CALLY index was higher: in the fully adjusted model, each 1-unit higher log-CALLY value carried a hazard ratio of 0.59, with a 95% confidence interval from 0.51 to 0.68.1 The useful interpretation is prognostic, not therapeutic: …
A 2026 population-based polysomnography study involving 1,206 adults found current smokers had 1.75x higher odds of worse obstructive sleep apnea severity than non-smokers or occasional smokers after adjustment for age and body mass index. Former smokers showed almost the same overall signal — 1.76x higher odds than never smokers — but that part of the …