Medical Xpress news

Medical Xpress / Shingles vaccination associated with delayed dementia onset in older adults

Every three seconds, someone, somewhere in the world, develops dementia. The number of people living with the condition is projected to rise dramatically, doubling from 78 million in 2020 to 139 million by 2050, making dementia ...

Medical Xpress / How sleep loss can damage your brain's wiring

Sleep loss damages the fatty insulation protecting the nerve cells in our brain, according to a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research also explains why we often feel ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Neuroscience
Medical Xpress / Saline nasal spray alone resolves sleep-disordered breathing in nearly one-third of children, study finds

Investigators based at Monash Children's Hospital and Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne report that a once-daily intranasal saline spray resolved obstructive sleep-disordered breathing symptoms in nearly one-third of children ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Pediatrics
Medical Xpress / Pink noise reduces REM sleep and may harm sleep quality

Pink noise—often used to promote sleep—may reduce restorative REM sleep and interfere with sleep recovery. In contrast, earplugs were found to be significantly more effective in protecting sleep against traffic noise, ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Sleep disorders
Dialog / Our body is doing fat-math (better than you'd imagine)

Remember seeing your triglyceride levels in your lab report? Ah! Fats you may dismiss, thinking of the next gym work you need to head to. Fatty acids are broken down via a process called β-oxidation. But did you ever wonder ...

Medical Xpress / Why we sleep poorly in new environments: A brain circuit that keeps animals awake

You check into a hotel and toss and turn all night, but your sleep improves the following night. Scientists at Nagoya University wanted to understand why this happens. Working with mice, they have identified a group of neurons ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Neuroscience
Medical Xpress / Night owl or early bird? Study finds sleep categories aren't that simple

The familiar labels "night owl" and "early bird," long used in sleep research, don't fully capture the diversity of human internal clocks, a new study has found. The McGill University-led study published in Nature Communications ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Neuroscience
Medical Xpress / Protective mechanism discovered in female brain: Switched-off X chromosome can reactivate to reduce disease severity

Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) have identified a mechanism that protects the female brain from genetic diseases. Although one of the two X chromosomes is switched off in female cells ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Neuroscience
Medical Xpress / Chemo before 3 pm could be more successful for lung cancer patients

Patients with advanced lung cancer who received immunochemotherapy before 15:00 (3 p.m.) had a more delayed disease progression than patients receiving treatment later in the day. The findings, published as part of a randomized ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Medications
Medical Xpress / Immunotherapy could prevent the loss of neurons in Parkinson's disease

By analyzing tissue from patients with Parkinson's disease, and animal and cellular models of the disease, a research team from the Institut de Neurociències of the UAB has shown that the main immune cells of the brain become ...

Medical Xpress / Brain microenvironment redefines metastatic tumor subtypes, facilitating precision oncology treatment

An interdisciplinary multi-center research team led by the LKS Faculty of Medicine (HKUMed) and Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Hong Kong has constructed the world's largest multi-omics atlas of brain metastases. ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Oncology & Cancer
Medical Xpress / Inside the newborn mind: Babies categorize objects in the brain at just two months old, neuroscientists discover

Babies as young as two months old are able to categorize distinct objects in their brains—much earlier than previously thought—according to new research from neuroscientists at Trinity College Dublin. The research, which ...

Feb 2, 2026 in Psychology & Psychiatry