A 2026 mixed-methods study of group physical activity inside psychiatric treatment found that 90% of participants joined to have a healthy body and get fresh air, 97% felt supported by activity leaders, and 91% wanted to stay active with others after treatment.1 The useful message is not “tell people with severe mental illness to exercise”; …
A 2026 meta-analysis of 8 controlled trials found that AVATAR therapy reduced auditory verbal hallucination severity after treatment, Hedges’ g = −0.40, 95% CI −0.54 to −0.25, across 978 participants.1 The signal is real, but the strongest reading is short-term symptom calibration rather than a finished replacement for standard psychosis care. Research Highlights Voice severity …
Mental-health AI agents are software systems that use artificial intelligence to screen, coach, triage, document, or coordinate care across mental-health workflows. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of systems published from 2023 to 2025 found strong offline diagnostic metrics, but the evidence still leans much more heavily on chatbot demos and benchmark tasks than on …
A 2026 cross-sectional study of 519 older adults with first-episode depression found that the NOS3 rs1799983 TT genotype was independently associated with cognitive impairment, adjusted OR 1.720 (95% CI 1.027-2.882).1 The result is strongest as a vascular-inflammation clue, not as a ready clinical genetic test. Research Highlights TT genotype carried the headline signal: in multivariable …
Psychopathy is not a simple “low empathy equals abnormal brain scan” story. In 804 incarcerated men, psychopathy factors tracked empathic concern, perspective taking, cortical thickness, surface area, and cortical organization—but self-reported empathy scores did not map cleanly onto cortical structure.1 Research Highlights The sample was unusually large for forensic MRI. Radecki et al. analyzed 804 …
A 2026 scoping review screened 956 systematic reviews/guidelines and 604 original studies on cancer-survivor neuropathic pain, but only 11 pharmacological, 2 psychological, and 3 exercise studies were eligible.1 The practical signal is narrow: duloxetine and some exercise programs have the clearest support, while psychological and interdisciplinary evidence is still too thin for confident treatment ranking. …
A matched case-control study of 50 children with autism spectrum disorder and 50 controls found that newborn amino acid metabolism overlapped with both later autism diagnosis and prenatal air-pollution exposure.1 The central pathway, aspartate and asparagine metabolism, was associated with autism (p = 0.01), pregnancy PM2.5 (p < 0.001), first-trimester PM2.5 (p < 0.001), and …