Many people might be aware of an ongoing opioid epidemic, with thousands of people dying every year from overdoses. But many who are misusing opioids are also using—and dying from—stimulant drugs as well, according to a study published July 2 in the open access journal PLOS Mental Health by Yutong Li from the University of Alberta, Canada, and colleagues.

Food insecurity is not only linked with, but directly causes symptoms of anxiety and depression, according to research published in the open access journal PLOS Mental Health. Melissa Bateson of Newcastle University, UK, and colleagues at École Normale Supérieure, Northumbria University and York University, collected monthly data from adults in the UK and France and found that changes in food insecurity one month resulted in changes in symptoms of anxiety and depression the next. The authors therefore propose that interventions to reduce food insecurity would have immediate positive impacts on mental health.

A new way of predicting whether a kidney donor and recipient are a good match for transplantation could complement existing methods to identify patients at higher risk of rejecting a new organ and who may benefit from additional immunosuppression to reduce that risk.

Researchers at UChicago Medicine found that a slight increase in walking cadence led to meaningful improvements in physical function for older adults who were frail or at risk of becoming frail. They also developed and tested an app to help measure walking pace more accurately.

When trying to understand the health of long-past populations, sometimes you have to rely on nothing but the bones. In anthropology, porous cranial lesions (PCLs) — areas of pitting on the roof of the eye socket (called cribra orbitalia) and on top of the skull (called cribra cranii) — have traditionally been considered tell-tale signs of poor childhood health in past populations, but have rarely been tested.