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Khabre desk
Recent reporting, analysis and explainers from the clinical-research desk.
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A model trained on 3D movement recordings from 3,328 adults predicted health phenotypes across 18 body systems. Its learned movement representations outperformed conventional gait measurements for several traits, including age and body composition.
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An analysis of 6,803 participants in Japan found two contrasting gut-microbiome patterns statistically mediating links between lifestyle factors, general health and 15 chronic diseases. The patterns were associated with microbial metabolism, faecal short-chain fatty acids and inflammatory markers, but the study design cannot establish that the microbiome causes the health outcomes.
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A six-month study of 356 perimenopausal women in China found that microbiome changes during hormone therapy differed by body site. Microbial patterns present before treatment were associated with differences in hormonal and symptom responses.
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Researchers introduced EVLF-FM, a medical vision-language model that diagnoses images, answers questions and identifies relevant image regions. Its evaluations covered more than 1.3 million development and test samples, with external validation on 13,443 samples.
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A Nature Medicine review describes why people with obesity can differ in insulin sensitivity and related metabolic measures. It also examines how metabolic responses to weight reduction vary.
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A Nature Medicine study found that T-cell patterns in blood and cerebrospinal fluid were associated with ALS progression in different ways. CMV-specific immune responses were also linked to faster progression or shorter survival in some patient groups.
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A blinded preprint compared five large language models on 17 synthetic emergency-department cases. All named the reference diagnosis, but triage assignments and clinician ratings of response quality differed.
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A randomised trial at BMJ Open found that asking authors to use a SPIRIT-based template during revision modestly improved the completeness of randomised trial protocols. Revision times were similar between groups, although some responding authors found the template time-consuming.
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A medRxiv preprint tested a structural MRI model for psychosis risk across four independent clinical high-risk cohorts. Its discrimination was weak, predicted risks transferred poorly, and exploratory analyses found variation by negative-symptom severity.
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A BMJ obituary recounts Alan Lucas’s 1982 multicentre trial of feeding in preterm infants and later follow-up research on development and health. It credits Lucas with coining “nutritional programming” for the idea that early nutrition can shape outcomes later in life.
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A phase 1 trial tested a personalized neoantigen vaccine after platinum chemotherapy in people with high-grade epithelial ovarian cancer. The researchers reported biological activity signals in six of 10 vaccinated patients, alongside immune responses in blood and tumour.
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A medRxiv systematic review of 39 studies found that mental-health treatment outcomes for autistic people varied by intervention. Where significant differences were reported, they generally involved smaller improvements rather than no benefit.
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Researchers tested a smartphone-based AI platform that let 13 hospitalised adults with epilepsy receive EEG alerts, query personal data and label seizure detections. In simulations, fine-tuning seizure detectors with patient feedback reduced false alarms, but the study was a small inpatient proof of concept.
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An analysis of more than 300 million laboratory tests reconstructed group-level changes around the final menstrual period and found step-like shifts across many body systems. The study also found hormone changes beginning more than a decade before that point and an observational association between menopausal hormone therapy and smaller shifts.
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A longitudinal study linked routine clinical records from 52,236 adults with cancer to identify recurring episodes of significant weight loss. The episodes clustered around disease progression and were associated with consistent blood-marker changes and several tumor mutations.
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A medRxiv preprint reports a remote, voice-based method for testing patient-facing AI intake chatbots with standardized-patient encounters. In a pilot, the chatbot covered fewer critical history elements in harder cases, while summary ratings remained near ceiling.
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A medRxiv preprint reports that label-free imaging of 10 μL whole-blood samples distinguished sepsis from other critical illness and healthy controls in a prospective study. The study included 29 critically ill adults, so its performance findings are preliminary.
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A prospective six-patient preprint evaluated Hiporfin for fluorescence-guided surgery and cavity photodynamic therapy in recurrent glioblastoma. Fluorescence had moderate specimen-level diagnostic accuracy, with some tumour samples not fluorescing.
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A retrospective analysis of 11 Kenyan neonatal units found weekly admissions nearly halved during the 2024 physicians’ strike and returned to baseline afterward. Inpatient mortality showed no measurable overall change, while case fatality among newborns with recorded infection doubled.
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A 12-patient preprint reports that duplex sequencing detected the aristolochic acid-associated SBS22a mutation signature in blood and urine from patients with signature-positive urothelial tumours. The findings are a proof of concept, not yet a validated population screening test.
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A Nature Medicine study introduces the openly released MedGemma models and MedSigLIP, a medical-image encoder, and evaluates them across medical text and imaging benchmarks. The results suggest useful starting points for adapted systems, while clinical applications still require task-specific validation.
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A medRxiv preprint describes an algorithm that identified 880,926 pregnancies in Greater Manchester primary-care records. Validation results varied by outcome, with a substantial gap between the register’s miscarriage and termination rates and published UK estimates.
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A study of 62,560 individuals across diverse ancestries found no evidence that rare variants in TMEM106B are associated with Parkinson's disease risk. The findings suggest the gene's rare variation does not play a major role in PD susceptibility, despite evidence that TMEM106B expression is altered in the brains of people with the disease.
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A study of 30,533 US adults found that among three routine blood-test inflammatory indices, only the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio independently predicted cardiovascular mortality, with SII and PLR adding little predictive value.
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A preprint describes a causal digital-twin framework that estimates individual survival benefit from chemoradiotherapy versus radiotherapy alone in head and neck cancer, stratified by HPV status.
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A Nature Medicine study reports that urine cell-free RNA sequencing detected localized bladder cancer with 95% sensitivity at 90% specificity. The researchers also investigated its potential for detecting residual disease and predicting response to bladder treatments.
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A pooled analysis of 1,038 patients found 86.5% five-year overall survival after neoadjuvant immune checkpoint inhibitors for resectable melanoma. Among patients whose tumours had a major pathological response, estimated five-year survival was 98%.
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A preprint meta-analysis of 14 observational studies found that preoperative anaemia was associated with higher odds of transfusion, kidney complications, early mortality and infection after adult cardiac surgery. The authors report low or very low certainty for these findings and say the observational evidence cannot establish causation.
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A Nature Medicine review surveys barriers to reproducible biomedical research and proposes a practical framework for researchers, institutions, journals and funders. It highlights the potential costs of research findings that cannot be reproduced.
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In a first-in-human phase 1 trial, the oral WRN inhibitor RO7589831 produced disease control in 74.2% of 66 evaluable patients with MSI cancers, with confirmed partial responses in seven. The study selected two doses for further testing, while tumour biopsies did not provide a conclusive measure of target engagement.
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A BMJ research methods paper presents INSPECT-SR, a 21-check tool for assessing the trustworthiness of randomised controlled trials in systematic reviews. It guides reviewers to judge concerns across four domains, but is not a fraud-detection or risk-of-bias tool.
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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 methylation-based blood test detected recurrence of non-viral head and neck cancer with 76.9% sensitivity and 94.6% specificity, and preceded clinical detection by a median of 131 days in 60% of cases where both occurred. Positive results were strongly associated with worse one-year survival.
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A preprint study of 1,268 South African adolescent girls found that DXA-measured body composition, particularly central fat distribution, is associated with elevated blood pressure. The findings highlight the importance of body composition balance and modifiable factors like sedentary behaviour.
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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 systematic review and meta-analysis of three randomized controlled trials involving 519 patients found that EUS-guided choledochoduodenostomy with a lumen-apposing metal stent had higher technical success than ERCP with a self-expandable metal stent for malignant distal biliary obstruction. Procedure time and postprocedural pancreatitis risk were also lower, while clinical success and overall adverse events were comparable.
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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 reports that repeated odour cues delivered during sleep improved PTSD symptoms and accelerated treatment response when paired with 12 weeks of trauma-focused psychotherapy. The findings combine a mechanistic study in healthy participants with a randomized clinical trial.
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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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Whole-genome sequencing of 7,851 parent–offspring families linked distinct assisted reproductive technology procedures and parental age with de novo mutations associated with gestational duration and other birth outcomes.
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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.