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Khabre desk
Recent reporting, analysis and explainers from the Clinical Research desk.
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A medRxiv preprint reports higher C-index estimates for several survival outcomes when Evo2-derived tumor-sequence features were added to existing risk models. The study analysed 102 patients with soft-tissue sarcoma and a separate 129-patient TCGA cohort; clinical use requires further validation.
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A medRxiv preprint reports improved clinical outcomes and changes in immune markers after N-acetylcysteine treatment in cancer patients with severe COVID-19. The clinical comparison used severity-matched patients treated before the trial began.
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A systematic review and external validation assessed 48 models for predicting four adverse pregnancy outcomes using more than 1.58 million UK pregnancies. Most showed limited discrimination and substantial miscalibration in the UK cohort.
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An analysis of the NHS-Galleri trial reports Galleri’s performance across three annual screening rounds, including falling episode sensitivity in later rounds. The trial’s primary endpoint—a reduction in stage III/IV cancer diagnoses—was not met.
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A Nature Medicine study identified menopause-related blood protein patterns associated with hormonal changes, brain aging and less favourable cognitive outcomes later in life. The observational findings provide a research framework for studying how the menopause transition may intersect with dementia risk.
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A medRxiv preprint describes a method that distils multimorbidity reasoning from large language models into smaller models using synthetic cohorts shaped like UK Biobank data. The resulting models achieved Spearman correlations of 0.75–0.89 and produced scores associated with improved survival prediction in a UK Biobank analysis.
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A six-month pilot in 138 cognitively normal adults used family history, genetics and plasma pTau217 to identify people at higher Alzheimer’s risk. Participants who received personalised lifestyle coaching reported less worry, while cognitive scores and lifestyle-risk measures remained unchanged and pTau217 showed only a slower rise.
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A medRxiv preprint describes an open-source framework that synchronized 6,384 hours of chronic deep brain stimulation recordings with wearable data from three people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
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A medRxiv preprint analysed 344 postoperative drain-fluid samples from 67 pancreatic and colorectal surgery patients. It found that leakage was associated with different protein patterns over time in the two types of surgery.
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A retrospective study of 10,634 percutaneous coronary interventions found radiation-alert threshold breaches in 0.93% of procedures and 2.1% of complex procedures. The authors developed an internally assessed score using early clinical and procedural variables.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that Ataraxis Breast CTX, a multimodal AI model using clinical data and H&E images, separated five-year disease-free survival in a selected group of 556 clinically high-risk, node-positive HR+/HER2- early breast cancer patients. An exploratory analysis found that everolimus benefit varied by the model’s score.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that chronic brain recordings from 24 people receiving deep brain stimulation for treatment-resistant OCD distinguished likely responders before stimulation and tracked early treatment engagement. The findings describe a potential biomarker framework, but the study is still a preprint.
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An ETH Zurich preprint used physiological and environmental signals from 20 participants to distinguish ambient temperature, humidity and physical exertion with 94.7% Random Forest accuracy. The exploratory study is an early step toward person-centred heat monitoring and requires testing in real-world settings.
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A medRxiv preprint analysing 8,741 female participants older than 70 reports that associations between menopause hormone therapy, cognition and brain structure differed by treatment formulation and APOE ε4 status. Among APOE ε4 carriers, estradiol-based therapy was linked to more favourable cognitive and imaging measures than conjugated equine estrogens.
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A medRxiv preprint found that appropriate-use guidance reduced nuclear stress-test ordering for some emergency observation-unit patients. Echocardiogram use increased, leaving combined use of the two tests essentially unchanged.
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A medRxiv preprint links moderate-to-vigorous leisure-time activity with lower BMI, waist-to-height ratio and central-adiposity risk in adults aged 60 to 80 at high cardiovascular risk. The analysis found the strongest reduction in central-adiposity risk up to about 400 MET·min/day.
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A medRxiv protocol describes the MINTS study, which will examine 14 home-based motor-imagery neurofeedback sessions in 21 people with chronic stroke and persistent upper-limb impairment. The study will combine mobile EEG, stationary EEG, functional MRI and repeated motor assessments.
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A medRxiv preprint reports 41 genetic risk regions associated with juvenile idiopathic arthritis, including 14 not previously reported in the analysis. The study also describes a polygenic risk score and possible mechanisms involving HLA-A*02:01, ERAP2 and DNA topology.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that laromestrocel reduced measures of brain inflammation and atrophy in 49 people with mild Alzheimer’s disease. The findings come from an early clinical study and have not yet been published as a peer-reviewed journal article.
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A medRxiv preprint evaluated 14 general-purpose large language models on eight schizophrenia symptoms in clinical summaries from a 704-person severe mental illness cohort. Performance was poor to moderate overall, with negative symptoms extracted less accurately than positive symptoms.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that plasma p-tau217 showed the broadest association with later Alzheimer’s-related brain atrophy among cognitively unimpaired participants. The observational analysis included 818 people and 2,293 longitudinal brain MRI scans.
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A medRxiv preprint describes a modified endpoint QuIC assay that detected prion seeding activity in sporadic CJD brain samples within six hours, with some results available in two hours. The assay showed 100% sensitivity and specificity in the reported CSF testing.
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A 2026 readjudication of the 330-person ADVOCATE trial found avacopan produced remission rates similar to a prednisone taper in granulomatosis with polyangiitis and microscopic polyangiitis. The preprint also reports lower glucocorticoid exposure and toxicity with avacopan.
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A medRxiv preprint used proteome-wide Mendelian randomization to identify 11 plasma proteins associated with early-onset stroke, defined as stroke occurring before age 60. The strongest signals involved coagulation and thromboinflammatory pathways, with Factor XI highlighted as a potential therapeutic target.
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A prospective medRxiv study of 121 adults found six anaerobic species enriched in anal squamous cell carcinoma compared with high-grade lesions. The microbial pattern persisted during follow-up and changed after treatment initiation.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that 12 weeks of adapted tango improved clinical and motor outcomes in people with mild-to-moderate Parkinson’s disease. Leader and follower roles were associated with partly different changes in brain-network connectivity.
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An observational study of people with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis found Epstein–Barr virus-associated immune signals and expansion of atypical B cells weeks to months before clinical relapse. The findings identify a possible peripheral precursor of relapse, but the connection to inflammation in the brain and spinal cord remains unresolved.
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A single-centre observational preprint reports treatment-associated improvement in several catatonic signs among autistic patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy. The findings highlight how catatonia may resemble worsening autism during later regression.
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A six-patient preprint found higher interferon-related gene scores in blood samples associated with dermatomyositis flares. The feasibility study used weekly at-home blood microsampling and RNA sequencing.
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A medRxiv preprint analysing preoperative imaging from 999 people with newly diagnosed glioblastoma found that a tractography-based measure of tumour involvement across white-matter pathways was more consistently associated with overall survival than tumour volume. The finding is based on a multi-institution imaging and survival analysis, not a treatment trial.
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A medRxiv preprint analyses more than 4.29 million audiograms and models human hearing as a continuous five-dimensional system rather than a set of fixed types. The secondary analysis could provide a new framework for studying hearing change, but it is not a clinical trial or treatment study.
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A medRxiv preprint analysing 50,463 free-living meals from 992 adults without diagnosed diabetes found that model-derived glucose-response scores estimated from three days of monitoring approximated scores from 14 days. The analysis also identified two major dimensions of individual meal responses and tested them against 4,524 held-out standardized meals.
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A Nature Medicine study describes a fully on-premise clinical AI agent that combines diagnostic reasoning with repeated-run consistency checks. On a seven-disease benchmark, the system retained 98.9% accuracy among cases selected for autonomous handling at a defined consistency threshold, while routing the rest for review.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that altered placental LBX1 was associated with spontaneous preterm birth in analyses of 70 placentae and 53 maternal plasma samples. Cell findings suggest a pathway involving nuclear import, ribosomal disruption and the unfolded protein response.
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A medRxiv preprint compared matched blood and bone-marrow cell-free DNA from 74 people with multiple myeloma. Peripheral-blood cfDNA matched or exceeded marrow-plasma cfDNA for several genomic signals, while fragment patterns varied by sample compartment and handling.
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A medRxiv preprint analysing 12,944 participants from nationally representative cohorts in China, England and the United States found that higher estimated cardiorespiratory fitness was associated with a lower risk of developing two or more cardiometabolic conditions. The observational study suggests that a non-exercise fitness estimate may help characterise risk, but it does not establish that increasing fitness prevents these conditions.
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A medRxiv preprint reports seven genomic risk loci associated with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome after analysis of UK Biobank and All of Us data. The findings provide leads for studying the condition’s biology, but the study is based on a preprint and no locus was significant across all three cohorts.
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A medRxiv systematic review and meta-analysis found that the blood biomarker GFAP distinguished intracerebral hemorrhage from ischemic stroke, with pooled specificity of 87.2%. Accuracy was higher in samples taken within two hours, but sensitivity remained limited, particularly for smaller hemorrhages.
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A systematic review of 230 human low-intensity focused ultrasound experiments found that acoustic settings associated with neural facilitation or suppression differed between cortical and subcortical targets. The medRxiv preprint introduces SonoMap, an interactive resource for comparing these parameter-effect patterns.
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A medRxiv preprint combining genetic and single-cell analyses identifies bone-marrow macrophages as a possible link between aging and osteoporosis. It nominates TGFB1 and HNRNPUL1 as regulators in this relationship, based on observational, genetic and transcriptomic evidence.
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A medRxiv preprint evaluated a large-language-model pipeline for assessing risk of bias in neurological prognosis studies. Agreement with original human assessments was limited, while a small comparison suggested a similar level of agreement to that between human raters.
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A medRxiv preprint identifies two auditory nerve response patterns in older adults, including one associated with MRI and histological signs of reduced myelin integrity. People with this poorer-synchrony pattern reported greater hearing difficulties relative to their hearing thresholds.
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A medRxiv preprint evaluates BanffNET indices that summarise kidney-transplant biopsy injury and distinguish several Banff pathology categories. The model was assessed across 6,407 biopsies and a multi-reader study involving 67 pathologists.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that a risk score based on 28 gut microbial species was associated with cancer diagnoses during up to 10 years of follow-up. The finding comes from an observational analysis and represents a candidate biomarker for future validation, not a clinical screening test.
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A Nature Medicine study reports CRISP, a clinically oriented pathology foundation model developed using more than 100,000 frozen sections, with prospective evaluation in more than 3,000 patients.