A 2026 medRxiv preprint involving 65 early subacute stroke survivors found that a composite cerebral small-vessel disease MRI score predicted 90-day cognitive recovery more reliably than any single input marker.1 Lower baseline burden predicted higher follow-up Montreal Cognitive Assessment scores (β = −0.19; p = 0.009) and remained associated after baseline cognition was included (β …
A 2026 mouse study found that complete IL-6 deficiency worsened motor dysfunction and dopaminergic injury in MPTP and alpha-synuclein A53T Parkinson’s disease models, with earlier and broader vulnerability in female knockout mice.1 The result cuts against a simple “less inflammation is always better” frame: recombinant IL-6 partly improved MPTP-induced motor dysfunction and striatal dopaminergic terminal …
A 2026 mouse circuit study found that restraint stress progressively reduced medial prefrontal social coding: mPFC excitatory-neuron transient rates fell to roughly 70-80% of baseline after acute stress and nearly 50% after chronic stress, while suppressing either basolateral-amygdala input or hypothalamic oxytocin input restored social discrimination and behavior.1 The result is a circuit-specific oxytocin finding, …
A 2026 Clinical Epigenetics study tracked DNA methylation biological age in 894 older adults and found that each 1-SD higher biological-age slope predicted 17-28% higher all-cause mortality risk across 5 epigenetic clocks.1 The clocks moved more slowly than calendar time over 8.1 years, but participants with higher methylation-age slopes had worse survival than participants with …
A 2026 quantitative MRI preprint reanalyzed 138 healthy adults and found that multivariate modeling detected coordinated age-related shifts across myelin-sensitive, iron-sensitive, and water-sensitive brain maps.1 The signal was broad, but split-half validation weakened the result enough to keep it in the measurement-method lane rather than the clinical-test lane. Research Highlights 138 adults were reanalyzed: The …
A 2026 NF1 mouse-model study found a gut-brain signal that was strongest in males: Nf1 +/- mice had altered gut microbiome composition, higher relative brain mass in 2 cohorts, reduced sociability, and combined autism-like phenotype shifts, with male microbiome beta diversity differing from controls at p = 0.0120.1 The result is a preclinical mechanism lead, …
A 2026 review ties the Parkinson’s disease genes PINK1 and parkin to damaged-mitochondria cleanup, from damage sensing and ubiquitin tagging to autophagy recruitment and lysosomal degradation.1 That shifts “mitochondrial dysfunction” into specific failure points: tagging, extraction, transport, autophagosome recruitment, and degradation. Research Highlights 18 PARK loci frame inherited risk: PARK2 encodes parkin and PARK6 encodes …