Subthalamic deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) gives most patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease meaningful motor relief, but a subset develops new or worsened impulse control disorders — pathological gambling, compulsive shopping, hypersexuality, binge eating — while others see preexisting symptoms improve. A 2026 prospective preprint from Loehrer et al. used pre-surgical diffusion MRI to identify microstructural …
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 …
Chronic low-grade inflammation rises with age, and a growing body of work asks whether peripheral inflammatory markers in blood track subtle changes in brain white-matter microstructure on MRI. A 2026 preprint from the Healthy Minds for Life cohort by Mishra and colleagues at Johns Hopkins examined 457 dementia-free adults aged 50–79 and found that higher …