The University of Texas at San Antonio has been awarded a five-year, $44 million contract from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health for a landmark Risk Underlying Rural Areas Longitudinal (RURAL) Cohort Study focused on persistent health challenges in the rural South.

For nearly 25 years, scientists believed they knew what caused the most severe form of narcolepsy. A new UCLA Health study now suggests they were only half correct. In a study published in Nature Communications, UCLA Health researchers discovered that narcolepsy with sudden loss of muscle strength, known as cataplexy, involves degeneration of neurons in not one, but two regions of the brain. Using a combination of postmortem brains and animal models, UCLA researchers found degeneration of neurons in a second critical region located on the brainstem known as the locus coeruleus. This small but important cluster of cells produces norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter involved in arousal and the regulation of muscle tone.

New research published in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health found that a low-fat vegan diet reduced food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 57%—nearly three times more than a Mediterranean diet—while also improving key cardiometabolic outcomes.

Artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT are increasingly being explored in cancer care, but they can sometimes produce outdated or incorrect information. In medicine, where accuracy is critical, that risk is a serious concern.

A new scoping review from the University of Toronto reveals that caregivers of loved ones with ovarian cancer face significant emotional strain, heavy caregiving responsibilities, and limited support throughout the disease trajectory. The scoping review, published in PLOS One this week, analyzed 32 studies spanning 25 years and identified consistent challenges experienced by caregivers before, during, and after their loved one’s illness.

Targeting only a small group of well-connected individuals with smoking reduction interventions produces the largest reductions in smoking, researchers report. The findings provide actionable insights for designing social network-based interventions that leverage peer influence effectively. Peer influence plays a powerful role in shaping adolescent behavior, particularly in health-related habits such as smoking, as behaviors and norms spread through social networks during a developmentally sensitive period. Although prior research has shown that such influences can cascade through friendships and even friends-of-friends, how quickly the influence fades with social distance, and how social network structure affects that process, has remained unclear. Using Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models (SAOMS) and data from 3,154 students across two schools in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) dataset, Cheng Wang and colleagues investigated how peer influence decays across social distance. To better understand how behavioral effects spread and diminish, they evaluated the effects of different smoking reduction intervention strategies, targeting either random students or those most central within social networks. Wang et al. found that peer influence in the context of smoking reduction interventions extends up to three degrees of separation from intervention targets. Targeting 10 to 30% of highly connected individuals within a social network produced the greatest reductions in smoking, while increasing coverage beyond 40 to 50% yielded diminishing returns due to network saturation. Moreover, the authors discovered that social network structure mattered. For example, influence spread more widely and decayed more slowly in denser networks, while sparser networks showed more limited diffusion.