- 31 posts this week
- 21 drivers followed
- 3 trackers refreshed
- Releases this week
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Official figures
Where the evidence stands
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established strengtheningEnvironment: air, heat, cold
How air pollution, heat and cold affect how long people live, how the attribution is made, and how the balance is changing.
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building mixedCancer
Which cancers are rising and which falling, what screening and new tests find earlier, what treatment has done to survival.
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established mixedSocial connection
How isolation and loneliness shorten lives, proving the causal relationship and what can be done.
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established mixedSmoking and vaping
How far smoking has fallen and how many deaths it still causes, what vaping is doing to the people who take it up, and what generational bans will show.
No papers yet -
emerging mixedMedicine out of hospital
What wearables, remote monitoring and care at home add to how health is measured and delivered, and whether it shows in outcomes.
No papers yet -
building strengtheningObesity, diabetes and the GLP-1 drugs
Are obesity and diabetes still rising, understanding behavioural change and public policy, what difference do GLP-1 and friends make.
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building strengtheningNew medicines
Which new drugs and vaccines could plausibly move how long people live, whether they reach the people who would benefit, and what the record says about medicines and life expectancy.
No papers yet -
building strengtheningMigration and population change
How far fertility has fallen below what was projected, how migration has become the assumption that moves projections most, and what both do to the mortality statistics.
No papers yet -
building strengtheningWhat linked data reveals
What linked registries are making it possible to know about whole populations
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building mixedMeasuring and projecting life expectancy
How the numbers are made, how much they revise their own past, and how well mortality can be forecast — and by whom.
No papers yet -
established steadyInfectious disease and pandemics
Infectious disease and pandemics: understanding both the risks and how well prepared we are
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established strengtheningInequalities in health and length of life
Whether inequalities in health and length of life are widening, where, and what is happening to health at working ages.
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building mixedFrailty and multimorbidity at the oldest ages
Whether the years added after 85 are healthy ones, how frailty and multiple conditions are measured, and where the limits of the data lie.
No papers yet -
established mixedDiet and physical activity
What people eat and how much they move, what the measured evidence says each does to how long they live, and what has been shown to change either.
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contested mixedDementia
Whether dementia is becoming more or less common, what is found earlier and why that clouds the count, what treatment and prevention now do, and what the deaths say.
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building mixedCardiovascular disease
Whether deaths from heart disease and stroke have stopped falling, what is found earlier, what treatment and prevention now do, and what the deaths say.
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emerging strengtheningCapacity, funding and care
What waiting lists, workforce shortage and the slowing growth of health and care spending cost in lives & how societies are paying for and providing care for older people.
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emerging strengtheningBiotechnology against inherited risk and ageing
What are the benefits of genomic risk prediction, what gene therapies can now do and at what cost, and whether anything yet slows ageing itself.
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building strengtheningWhat changes behaviour at scale
What moves a population's behaviour — price, defaults, availability, incentives, information — and what the evidence on vaccination, screening and adherence says about which of them work.
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established mixedAlcohol, drugs and suicide
What is happening to deaths from alcohol, drugs and suicide, whether they move together, and how much of it is behaviour and how much circumstance.
No papers yet -
emerging strengtheningAI in medicine
Whether machine learning predicts, detects and decides better than the tools we have, and whether that has yet changed an outcome for a population.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Review finds high ultra-processed food intake tracks with higher breast cancer incidence
A narrative review of the epidemiological and mechanistic literature reports that high ultra-processed food intake is associated with higher breast cancer incidence and possibly worse prognosis, while noting heterogeneity across populations, tumour subtypes and specific food exposures.
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Item new preprint
LLM-extracted autopsy brain features classify neurodegenerative disease with 75% accuracy
A fine-tuned large language model scored 39 features from narrative gross descriptions in 5,613 Mayo Clinic brain autopsies, and classification reached 0.75 accuracy, from 0.93 sensitivity for progressive supranuclear palsy to 0.03 for mixed Alzheimer–Lewy body disease.
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Item new preprint
A local multi-agent AI system deidentified multimodal hospital data at 99.8% sensitivity
A locally deployable multi-agent system combining multimodal large language models, task-specific networks and rule-based steps removed 99.82% of injected identifiers across text, imaging, handwriting and audio while preserving 99.61% of clinically important content.
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Item confirms preprint
Known dementia risk factors explain only a little of exceptional cognitive ageing
In 3,513 Whitehall II participants aged 65 and over, education, female sex, absence of hypertension, fewer depressive symptoms, higher fruit and vegetable intake and greater social activity were each modestly associated with 'SuperAger' cognitive status, none strongly.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Deprivation and renting track loneliness in excess of isolation among older English adults
In 8,164 English adults aged 60 and over followed across three ELSA waves, every socioeconomic indicator examined was independently associated with the gap between reported loneliness and measured social isolation, with renting and low internet use marking the largest vulnerability.
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Item confirms preprint
Vaccinated Spanish women show less HPV 16/18 and fewer high-grade cervical lesions
Among 908 women in Spanish cervical screening, HPV 16/18 was detected in 0.76% of vaccinated versus 5.5% of unvaccinated women, and high-grade cytological lesions in 0.38% versus 2.4%.
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Item refines preprint
Power to Quit campaign coincided with more quit attempts but no change in success
A pre/post evaluation of England's Power to Quit mass media campaign found quit attempts rose from 48.4% to 52.3% and use of digital support from 16.0% to 18.4%, both with confidence intervals spanning no effect, and no clear change in quit success.
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Item new preprint
PCV20 lowered pneumococcal pneumonia admissions by a fifth in US adults aged 65 and over
In 34,009 US Veterans Affairs pneumonia hospitalisations with respiratory cultures taken between 2023 and 2025, the 20-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine was associated with 20.4% lower odds of culture-confirmed pneumococcal pneumonia among adults aged 65 and over.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Advanced CKD tracks higher in-hospital death in STEMI shock on circulatory support
In 63,755 weighted US hospitalisations for STEMI with cardiogenic shock treated with mechanical circulatory support, in-hospital mortality rose from 30.7% with no chronic kidney disease to 40.7% with stage 4–5 disease, an adjusted odds ratio of 1.26.
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Item new peer-reviewed
No epidemiological evidence yet links e-cigarettes or snus to chemotherapy response
A systematic review of alternative tobacco and nicotine products during anticancer therapy found no epidemiological study of their effect on chemotherapy response, and a single in vitro signal of e-cigarette-induced cisplatin resistance failed to replicate in a multi-centre study.
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Releases this week
Next seven days: ONS monthly deaths (Thu 17); UKHSA all-cause mortality surveillance (Thu 17); CBS Eenzaamheid, in Dutch (Fri 18); Eurostat Healthcare personnel - dentists, pharmacists and physiotherapists (Fri 18); NCHS Deaths (Tue 22); ONS weekly deaths (Wed 23); and 1 more. Full calendar