For how we live.
STAREE randomised 9,971 Australians aged 70 and over to atorvastatin or placebo. Cardiovascular events fell by 30%. Death, dementia and persistent disability, taken together, did not move.
A systematic review of longitudinal MRI after CPAP for sleep apnoea finds changes reported in every domain and reproducible effects in none — a useful map of what the evidence does not yet show.
The range is the finding, not a failure of the study. 1,712 former players died between 2008 and 2021; 338 brains were examined, and who donates a brain is not random.
Two large cohorts link purpose in life to lower mortality and lower Alzheimer's risk. Whether purpose protects health, or health sustains purpose, is what the studies cannot fully separate.
Three successive birth cohorts over 22 years show falling prenatal pollution and rising test scores together. A separate review explains why the pathway from one to the other is still poorly mapped.
A 614-donor autopsy study tied advanced CTE to dementia independently of other brain disease. A separate imaging report in three former athletes hints at a test for the living. The caveats on both are heavy.
Stanford's SleepFM, published in Nature Medicine in January 2026, is the most consequential sleep paper of the year. Its own limitations section explains why it is not yet a clinical test.
The approved tests are for patients already showing cognitive decline. Used on the worried well, a positive result mostly signals a risk that may never become disease — and no treatment follows from it.
A review pooling prevalence across the region ties the projection to modifiable risks that are unusually common there — smoking, inactivity, diabetes — layered on rapid ageing.
Autopsy studies show educated brains carry the same disease but express it as dementia later. That is the concept's strength — and the reason it resists being turned into a to-do list.
ACHIEVE randomised 977 older adults and measured three-year cognitive change. The difference between hearing aids and health education was 0.002 SD units, p=0.96. One subgroup result is doing a lot of work.
Observational studies tie fitness to slower cognitive decline. When researchers randomise older adults to exercise, the cognitive payoff shrinks — in a Cochrane review of healthy people, to nothing.
The link between puzzles and a sharper old age is real in the data and largely the wrong way round: the earliest changes of dementia quietly reduce the very activities that later look protective.
A diet built to protect the brain looked powerful when researchers watched who chose to eat it. When they assigned it in a three-year trial, both groups improved by almost exactly the same amount.
A consortium reduced overnight sleep studies to nine composites. Two tracked with better cognition. None tracked with whether a person later developed dementia.
The best long-term trial found trained skills can last a decade. Whether they transfer to daily life, or hold off dementia, is where the evidence — and the FTC — parted ways with the marketing.
A standing commission estimates that eliminating 14 risk factors could prevent or delay 45% of dementia across a whole population. What that number means for one person is a different and much weaker claim.
A 2025 meta-analysis of 57 studies found the mortality curve bending at about 7,000 steps a day. The 10,000 figure traces to the trade name of a Japanese step counter sold in 1965.
A burden-of-disease calculation built on EU noise-mapping data puts numbers on two outcomes that noise research has mostly ignored. The confidence intervals are as informative as the estimates.
A six-year cohort study using Japan's long-term care records found a roughly 25% lower risk. The design cannot separate cooking from the ability to cook.
Pooling 94 cohort studies, grip strength tracked with later dementia, depression and disability. The authors rate their own confidence in the numbers as limited to moderate.
A 131,821-person cohort followed for up to 43 years and a dose-response meta-analysis of 450,000 people converge on roughly two to three cups — and diverge sharply above it.
A mirror that scores physiological age in 30 seconds. A watch that watches your gait for dementia. The gap between what these products measure and what they imply is the story of the show.
Pooling ten studies, researchers found menopause hormone therapy neither raised nor lowered dementia risk. The certainty of that evidence ranged from moderate to very low.
The guidance is built on one negative instruction: do not stop abruptly in patients likely to be physically dependent. Hong Kong records show the sharpest prescribing rise in 18-to-25-year-olds.