A 2026 prospective birth-cohort study in southern China linked mean cord-blood lead of 15.30 μg/L to lower infant neurodevelopmental scores across all 5 Ages and Stages Questionnaire domains, even though only 1.13% of samples exceeded 50 μg/L.1 A second finding was mechanistic: part of the lead-development association statistically ran through FAM50B/PTCHD3 DNA methylation, an epigenetic …
A 2026 pilot randomized trial in 16 frail adults with multiple sclerosis found that 6 weeks of supervised multimodal exercise was feasible: retention was 87.5%, adherence was 97.2%, no adverse events were recorded, and fatigue and quality-of-life scores moved more than they did with waitlist control.1 Research Highlights Feasibility cleared the prespecified bar: 14 of …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …