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Category: health

AI analyses of eye scans can detect diseases like diabetes, osteoporosis and thyroid disease in seconds

A new study presents an artificial intelligence system that scans images of the retina to detect signs of diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, gout, osteoporosis and thyroid disease in seconds. The program—called Reti-Pioneer—is a step toward being able to diagnose many different conditions from a scan of the eye, providing people a quicker diagnosis for common conditions and increasing access to crucial testing.

Associate Professor Lisa Zhuoting Zhu, head of ophthalmic epidemiology at CERA, is one of the leading authors on the paper published in Nature Medicine. She says this technology is making disease diagnosis more efficient, particularly in remote or regional communities.

“This technology will be a real benefit to public health,” says Zhu. “Patients would be able to get information about their health instantly and start interventions as soon as possible instead of waiting for more time-consuming test results.”

Silk sticker is noninvasive way to monitor babies’ health

In the neonatal intensive care unit, the most fragile patients in medicine are often the most heavily wired. Premature babies, some weighing less than a pound, can be tethered to a tangle of cables, monitors and sensors. Each blood draw to check sugar levels or electrolytes means another needle, another bandage, another moment of stress for an infant whose skin is still forming.

A team of researchers from Tufts University’s Silklab, Helmholtz Munich, Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) Munich and the Technical University of Munich have developed a radically gentler alternative: a featherlight, silk-based sticker, smaller than a coin, that quietly reads four critical health signals at once just by changing color.

The work, published in ACS Sensors, describes a wearable patch that captures temperature, pH, sodium and glucose from the wisps of fluid that pass naturally through a baby’s still-developing skin. An AI system reads the patch’s color shifts through any standard camera, even in the dim, humid, hard-to-photograph environment of an incubator, and translates them into precise numbers a clinician can act on.

Epidemiology of cardiovascular–kidney–metabolic syndrome

The cardiovascular–kidney–metabolic (CKM) syndrome paradigm is aimed at reflecting the complex interactions between chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease and metabolic dysfunction. Here, the authors discuss current CKM syndrome epidemiological data, examine key determinants of CKM health and consider the potential clinical implications and limitations of the CKM syndrome framework.

Nine-Valent HPV Vaccination and Related Cancers

This retrospective cohort study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) reporting guideline. We used the TriNetX platform, a large-scale global database, to evaluate the association of 9v-HPV vaccination for adolescent and young males aged 9 to 26 years with HPV-related cancers, including head and neck, penile, rectal, and anal cancers. TriNetX has stored electronic health records for approximately 190 million patients from 170 health care centers globally as of December 2025.17 Data collected in TriNetX included health care visits, diagnoses, procedures, medications, and laboratory results. In this study, the vaccinated cohort included males aged 9 to 26 years receiving at least one 9v-HPV vaccination with a health examination between January 2016 and December 2024. The unvaccinated cohort included males aged 9 to 26 years who underwent a health examination during the corresponding period but never received any HPV vaccination. Age categorization was based on the current recommendation for HPV vaccination.18 ‚19 Details of the data extraction code and cohort selection flowchart are provided in eTable 1 and eFigure 1 in Supplement 1.

The primary outcome in this study was a composite measure encompassing any diagnosis of the following cancers, as defined by the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision (ICD-10): head and neck cancers, penile cancer, esophageal cancer (upper two-thirds only), and anal cancer (eTable 2 in Supplement 1).20 The secondary outcomes included the individual diagnoses of each of the 4 cancers. Data were extracted on February 14, 2026. Outcome follow-up started 180 days after the index date. The index date was defined as the date of the first dose with health examination in the vaccinated group and the date of the first health examination in the unvaccinated group.

The TriNetX platform complied with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and General Data Protection Regulation.21 Therefore, informed consent was not required because this study utilized only deidentified and aggregated patient data. Although deidentified TriNetX studies generally do not require institutional review board approval,22 this study was reviewed and approved for publication by the institutional review board of Nara Prefecture General Medical Center.

Sugar-free diets may disrupt the gut microbiome, animal study indicates

Spread the love Eliminating sugar from your diet may be more detrimental than previously thought, according to an animal study presented at ENDO 2026, the Endocrine Society’s annual meeting in Chicago. Completely removing sucrose from a low-fat diet may unexpectedly disrupt gut health and promote inflammation and metabolic dysfunction, highlighting that balanced nutrition is more important…

Can scientists learn cells’ led team aims to decode cellular conversations

“You have many different cells playing different parts,” said Dr. Dino Di Carlo, the Armond and Elena Hairapetian Professor and Chair of Bioengineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “A healthy tissue emerges when those parts are coordinated — when cells listen and respond to one another in the right way.”

But when those signals are misheard or go out of sync, the results can be devastating. In fibrosis, a misfiring message drives cells into a scar-producing overdrive, stiffening lungs, hearts and kidneys. In cancer, tumor cells can distort the score, sending molecular signals that suppress or misdirect immune attack. What sounds like harmony in health can become discord in disease.

Now, in a perspective published in Nature Biotechnology, Di Carlo and colleagues from UCLA, USC and Caltech are calling on the scientific community to join the Billion Cell×Cell Project — an effort to understand the cellular symphony one duet at a time, by systematically mapping how individual pairs of cells influence one another.

The Placenta: The Organ That Programs Human Health Before Birth | Dr. Perrie O’Tierney-Ginn

Dr. Perrie O’Tierney-Ginn, Ph.D. — Executive Director of the Woman, Mother & Baby Research Institute — Tufts.

Before your heart, brain, or lungs fully developed, one remarkable temporary organ was making decisions that may influence your health for decades. Dr. Perrie O’Tierney-Ginn (https://www.placentascience.com/) explains why the placenta could be the most important organ you’ve never thought about.

Dr. Perrie O’Tierney-Ginn, Ph.D. is Executive Director of the Woman, Mother & Baby Research Institute at Tufts Medical Center (https://www.tuftsmedicine.org/researc… and a Research Associate Professor in both Obstetrics & Gynecology at Tufts University School of Medicine (https://www.tuftsmedicine.org/researc… and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy (https://nutrition.tufts.edu/academics…).

A self-described \.

Scientists measure hidden quantum forces that could power a new generation of pharmaceutical drugs

It’s one thing to design a pharmaceutical drug. It’s another to know if and why it actually works; not on paper or in a computer model, but inside the chaotic world of living systems, where proteins twist into shape, atoms constantly pull and push each other apart, and molecular interactions are the difference between health and disease.

For decades, scientists have known that these interactions are driven by hidden quantum forces. The problem is that, like working blindfolded, they’ve never been able to measure them directly in biological systems.

Now, that era of blindfolded work may be ending.

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