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Medicine & Health

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 31-Oct-2026 01:15 ET (31-Oct-2026 05:15 GMT/UTC)

LSD microdosing: Study indicates it makes women’s attention sharper, but no improvement in men

European College of Neuropsychopharmacology
Reports and Proceedings

A pilot study suggests that low doses of LSD may have different effects on sustained attention in women and men, adding to growing evidence that people may not all respond to psychedelic microdosing in the same way.

Meeting: 39th ECNP Congress

Managing high blood pressure could prevent >500K CVD deaths annually in 20 countries

American Heart Association
Reports and Proceedings

A modeling analysis of health data for 20 countries found that among preventive healthcare services, increasing control of high blood pressure may save the most lives, more than 518,000 fewer deaths particularly in upper and lower-middle-income countries.

Meeting: American Heart Association’s Hypertension Scientific Sessions 2026

Ketamine relieves pain without “disconnecting” consciousness

Tel-Aviv University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

For the first time, researchers have shown that ketamine activates two separate mechanisms in the brain, one for pain relief and another for altering the state of consciousness.

The findings may help in developing treatments that provide the benefits of ketamine while reducing its psychological side effects.

Journal: Neuropsychopharmacology

Paired nasal and plasma metabolomics reveal distinct recovery trajectories during allergy immunotherapy

International Society for Health Data Science
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A longitudinal metabolomics study of 28 patients with house dust mite-induced allergic rhinitis and 19 healthy controls found that plasma and nasal secretions capture distinct but complementary aspects of disease biology. After six months of clinically effective subcutaneous immunotherapy, both compartments shifted toward healthy profiles, but nasal metabolic recovery was more evident, revealing coordinated yet asynchronous systemic-local remodeling.

Funder: Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China, Noncommunicable Chronic Diseases-National Science and Technology Major Project, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Joint TCM Science & Technology Projects of National Demonstration Zones for Comprehensive TCM Reform

The Lancet: New Commission provides roadmap to protect economies, security and global stability from catastrophic threats to health and human survival

The Lancet
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The health of the next generation will be shaped not by one defining crisis, but by a set of 17 interlinked catastrophic threats spanning disease, social and economic conditions, environmental change, technology and conflict, finds a new Commission published in The Lancet and launched at the World Health Summit 2026 in Berlin. For the first time, it provides decision-makers with a common framework to understand these threats and target action.

Journal: The Lancet

Intensive breathing alters consciousness by changing brain communication

European College of Neuropsychopharmacology
Reports and Proceedings

Intensive breathing exercises can reduce blood flow to the brain by up to 45% and alter communication between brain networks, according to a new brain-imaging study. Participants reported experiences resembling some effects of psychedelic drugs, including altered perception, vivid mental imagery, a sense of unity and changes in self-experience. The researchers, presenting the work at the ECNP Congress in Munich (following recent publication), say changes in brain communication, rather than reduced blood flow alone, appear to be key to the altered state.

Meeting: 39th ECNP Congress

Regular periods, but worse symptoms: Women with bipolar disorder losing out on gynaecological care

European College of Neuropsychopharmacology
Reports and Proceedings

Researchers have found that women with bipolar disorder who have regular menstrual cycles are more likely to report severe premenstrual symptoms than those with irregular cycles, according to preliminary research being presented at the 2026 ECNP Congress in Munich.

Meeting: 39th ECNP Congress

Why is brucellosis spreading southward in China? Agri-food connectivity may be reshaping disease transmission

Science China Press
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A nationwide study integrating nearly two decades of epidemiological surveillance with genomic data from 4215 Brucella isolates across 79 countries has revealed how China’s rapidly evolving agri-food system may be reshaping the spread of human brucellosis.While livestock production remains closely associated with disease burden in northern China, southern cases are more strongly linked to agri-food logistics and market connectivity. Genomic analyses further uncovered a hierarchical transmission network connecting northern pastoral reservoirs to central relay hubs and historically low-risk southern provinces.

Journal: Science Bulletin

Comparative study on large model training methods based on distributed parallel and memory-saving mechanisms

ScholarCAST
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The research team from National University of Defense Technology systematically described the memory efficiency issues in the training process of large language models (LLMs) with Transformer architecture for scientific fields. As the scale of models continues to expand, memory requirements have become a key bottleneck restricting their applications in scientific fields such as biology, medicine, chemistry, and meteorology. The article systematically reviewed memory-efficient pre-training technologies at the algorithm level, system level, and software-hardware collaborative optimization, and combined with the AlphaFold 2 case, demonstrated how customized memory optimization methods can reduce storage overhead while maintaining prediction accuracy.

Journal: Frontiers of Computer Science

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