For how we live.
GSK's PD-1 blocker won accelerated US approval on 19 October for previously untreated stage II/III dMMR rectal cancer. In the single-arm AZUR-1 trial, most patients avoided surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.
In 108 people with Parkinson's, diffusion MRI found that damage to cholinergic pathways running from a deep-brain nucleus tracked worse cognition — and was most marked in those with dementia.
A six-site randomised trial of point-of-care high-sensitivity troponin cut emergency-department length of stay by 47 minutes, with no change in 30-day heart attacks or cardiac deaths.
In 947 Chinese children followed for ten years, those with insulin resistance despite normal blood sugar had a 4.3-fold higher risk of later dysglycaemia, and six amino acids helped predict who would develop it.
A cohort of 102 children born very preterm found epigenetic age acceleration linked to higher cognitive and motor scores at three — even, unexpectedly, in those with severe brain injury.
In 7,186 Korean adults followed up to 20 years, people flagged by fasting glucose, glucose tolerance and HbA1c all at once had a 15.3-fold higher risk of type 2 diabetes than normal controls.
From 300 million laboratory tests, an Israeli team reconstructs trajectories and finds bone, liver, kidney, hormone and lipid markers shift abruptly at the final menstrual period — changes starting a decade earlier.
In 1,448 pregnancies, lower early placental growth factor was linked to more preterm births — yet adding it to a prediction model lifted accuracy only from 0.59 to 0.68.
In a 200-patient prospective validation, a DNA-methylation assay reached an AUC of 0.91 and, by one analysis, could have averted about 55% of unnecessary biopsies without missing significant cancers.
The phase 3 CLL6 RESIDUUM trial extended progression-free survival by about 22 months in patients left with residual disease, but overall survival did not differ and the drug caused more infections.
Ceperognastat, an oral OGA inhibitor, showed no benefit on the primary cognitive endpoint at 100 weeks. The higher dose progressed 32% faster than placebo and had more serious adverse events.
An overactive thyroid speeds the body up; an underactive one slows it down. But no single symptom is reliable — in one large screening study, individual thyroid symptoms were poor at flagging who actually had a problem.
Insulin resistance usually causes no symptoms you can feel, which is why it is found through blood tests rather than how you seem. The visible clues are subtle — and it rarely travels alone.
Two controlled studies compared vitamins in fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables. Frozen matched fresh in most cases and sometimes beat it, especially against fresh produce that had spent a few days in the fridge.
Finnish cohorts link regular sauna bathing to lower cardiovascular and all-cause mortality, with a dose-response. But these are observational studies, and no randomised trial has tested sauna against death.
Physically acting out dreams is one of the strongest known early signs of Parkinson's and related diseases. In a 1,280-patient cohort, most converted within 12 years — but it is a risk marker, not a verdict.
Scans confirmed that adults keep heat-producing brown fat, switched on by cold and linked to better metabolic health. Whether you can build enough of it to matter for weight is far less certain.
The rise in chronic, low-grade inflammation with age is genuine, and researchers built a clock from it. The one large trial that lowered inflammation for a hard outcome treated heart disease, not ageing.
Epigenetic clocks estimate a 'biological age' from DNA methylation. A 2022 study found technical noise alone could shift the result by up to 9 years between replicates of the same sample.
The only long randomised trial of calorie restriction in non-obese adults improved cardiometabolic risk and modestly slowed one measure of biological ageing. Participants never hit the 25% target.
Adding pembrolizumab plus maintenance olaparib to first-line chemotherapy improved progression-free survival — but pembrolizumab added without olaparib did nothing at all.
Five-day fasting cycles improve risk markers and one 'biological age' estimate in small trials. No human study has yet shown the diet prevents disease or extends life.
Smart rings and watches measure peripheral skin temperature and report drift from your own baseline, not a thermometer reading. That makes them decent trend sensors and poor fever detectors.
Toilet seats and mirrors that read your heart and blood pressure are real engineering. The published validation is mostly small, single-lab or company-run — and outcome evidence is absent.
A 2013 paper named nine hallmarks of aging; a 2023 update made it twelve. The framework is the field's shared map — but critics argue it describes ageing without explaining it.
An arthritis antibody and a diabetes drug were given to depressed patients in 2026 trials. Both were designed to probe a mechanism rather than prove a treatment, and reading them as results would be a mistake.
Algorithms that read short voice recordings can pick up acoustic signs of some conditions. In the largest and most careful studies the signals are real but narrow, sex-specific, and often fail to generalise.
SERENA-6 changed therapy the moment a resistance mutation appeared in the blood, not when tumours grew. It nearly doubled time to progression — and won camizestrant FDA approval in 2026.
There are more than 18 million cancer survivors in the US, and finishing treatment is not the end of the health story. The strongest evidence for what helps is also the most ordinary.
Screening 2,904 proteins in early pregnancy, researchers found low maternal isthmin-2 was the strongest signal for later preeclampsia or fetal growth restriction, validated in two cohorts.
A blood test after surgery can detect tumour DNA too faint to see on a scan. In one trial it let colon-cancer patients safely skip chemotherapy — but the evidence is still narrow.
A Chinese birth cohort of 1,278 pairs found higher prenatal temperatures and heatwaves — especially in the second trimester — tracked with higher creatinine and urea in early childhood.
A transcriptomic sub-study of the CALERIE calorie-restriction trial links 151 genes to preserved leg strength during weight loss, independent of how much body mass was lost.
In 33 former players with autopsy-confirmed disease, memory, executive-function and language impairments were frequent before death, and greater tau burden tracked worse memory.
Galleri-type tests can flag a cancer signal from a tube of blood and often guess its origin. But they miss most early-stage cancers, and no trial has yet shown they help people live longer.
The length of your chromosome caps is a noisy population-level marker, not a personal verdict — and genetically longer telomeres raise the risk of several cancers, not lower it.
A trial of an anti-inflammatory antibody cut cardiovascular events without changing lipids. A genetic study of 194,418 people found the inflammation marker everyone measures is not itself causal.
A review in Gut says no intestinal disease can be cured by normalising barrier function, and that it is unproven whether restoring the barrier improves any clinical outcome at all.
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.
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.
Stage describes how far a cancer has spread at diagnosis. It is not the same as grade, it is set once, and it drives both prognosis and treatment more than almost any other number.
A meta-analysis of 45 cohorts found risk rising steadily with every 10 beats per minute. A study of 92,457 wearable users found one person's normal can differ from another's by 70 beats.
In 2023 declining taurine was proposed as a driver of ageing. Two years later the same journal published human, monkey and mouse data in which taurine rose or stayed flat.
An umbrella review of 42 reviews found only two wearable measures — heart rate and atrial fibrillation — with comparably strong support. Getting any device into a trial is harder than buying it.
Longevity trials want a measurement that moves in months instead of decades. A Berlin study ranked the candidates, and a four-week diet trial showed what a clock does when nothing much happens.
The targeted combination more than tripled progression-free survival versus placebo in iodine-refractory disease — but overall survival is not yet significant and the trial was mostly Asian.
In 230 adults followed a year, lower heart-rate variability and less moderate-to-vigorous activity at baseline were independently linked to developing hypertension. It is a risk signal, in one unreplicated cohort.
Smart-ring studies report flagging COVID nearly three days before symptoms and IBD flares weeks ahead. But two-thirds of that research carries a high risk of bias, and clinical usefulness is largely unproven.
In VERITAC-2 the oral degrader more than doubled progression-free survival over fulvestrant in patients with an ESR1 mutation — 5.0 months versus 2.1 — but not in the trial as a whole.
Bizengri now covers NRG1-fusion cholangiocarcinoma, a mutation found in a fraction of a fraction of cases. The evidence is 19 patients, of whom about a third responded.
Buntanetap showed dose-dependent cognitive benefit in biomarker-positive patients with mild disease. The company's announcement does not say what happened in the full 351-patient population.
Three February papers push plasma p-tau217 past detection: clock models estimating years to symptom onset, four assays compared head to head, and a real-world audit of what the result changes.
In 85 people with mild cognitive impairment, transient beta-band events recorded at rest differed years before diagnosis. The sample is small and the finding has not been replicated.
The NEJM paper reports 47 children in an open-label trial with no randomised control. The biomarker effect is large; the clinical claim rests on softer ground.
The biomarker effect reported at CTAD is large and sustained over two years. The sample is seven, the design is open dose-escalation, and imaging was available for three.
A small longitudinal study found reduced spindle activity over the temporal lobes in early Alzheimer's — and that lower temporal spindle density tracked with faster decline over up to seven years.
At a Mayo Clinic cohort of 252 patients, 40% of amyloid-negative people tested positive. The manufacturer says it has found a manufacturing problem and put the product on hold.
A decade-on review of chronic traumatic encephalopathy research reports that 5 of 70 veteran donors had features of the pathology and none met the full definition. A small UK rugby study looks elsewhere.
Sequencing hundreds of single neurons from 15 donors with CTE and 4 with repetitive head impacts but no CTE, researchers found the genomic damage tracked the disease, not the exposure.
Seventy-two runners were sampled before and after the 2024 Boston Marathon. Every marker of kidney and intestinal injury rose, and staying hydrated did not change that.
A 13-year-old observational hypothesis finally got its randomised test. In ALASCCA, 160 mg of daily aspirin cut three-year recurrence from 14.1% to 7.7% in biomarker-selected patients.