New Migraine Guideline Urges Prevention at 4 Headache Days
The first full update since 2012 gives its strongest marks to CGRP drugs and Botox, but keeps decades-old propranolol and topiramate on the same list.
Health News
Health News
The health headlines move fast and most coverage gets the science wrong. Every day, Dr. Ravi Kumar, MD, a board-certified neurosurgeon, cuts through the noise: what a new study or story actually says, what it doesn’t, and what it means for you. Researched, sourced, and reviewed before it’s published.
Heart Monitor After Fainting Doubled Arrhythmia Diagnoses
The ASPIRED trial of 2,234 adults at 45 UK hospitals failed to cut repeat fainting episodes, but it more than doubled arrhythmia detection and cut the wait for a diagnosis from 55 days to 22.
AFib Ablation Fixed the Rhythm but Not Quality of Life
In a new sham-controlled trial, catheter ablation for atrial fibrillation beat a fake version of the procedure on rhythm control but not on how patients said they felt six months later.
Early statins after diabetes diagnosis tied to less dementia
A Danish study of 132,585 adults newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes found that those who started a statin within the first year had a 15% lower relative risk of dementia over 10 years than those who never started one.
Trial finds aspirin is still needed after a heart attack
A 2,280-patient trial presented at ESC Congress 2026 found that giving a strong blood thinner without aspirin after a major heart attack cut serious bleeding by about a third but left more patients dead, reinfarcted or stroked at one year.
New Heart Failure Guidelines Recommend Semaglutide and Tirzepatide
The European Society of Cardiology's 2026 heart failure guidelines, published August 28, recommend semaglutide or tirzepatide for patients with preserved ejection fraction and obesity, and erase the middle ejection fraction category that has shaped treatment decisions for years.
Blood xylitol linked to 57% more heart attacks, strokes
A 17,710-person analysis presented at ESC Congress 2026 found that the higher a person's blood level of the sweetener xylitol, the higher their rate of death, heart attack or stroke, but the sweetener was measured in blood, not in the diet.
Blood thinners cut stroke risk in borderline AFib patients
The SINGLE-AF trial is the first randomized test of direct oral anticoagulants in atrial fibrillation patients whose stroke risk sits in the middle, a group guidelines have hedged on for years.
Children of centenarians live about 3 years longer
A three-cohort study in JAMA Network Open found that adults with a parent who reached 100 had sharply lower risks of death, heart disease, and high blood pressure, with no advantage against cancer.
Earlier menopause linked to faster brain aging in women
A study of 2,603 older women followed up to 18 years tied earlier menopause to faster memory decline and earlier Alzheimer diagnoses, but the largest imaging signal was vascular damage, not brain shrinkage.
At least 1 in 4 former NFL players had CTE at death
A BMJ study of all 1,712 former NFL players who died between 2008 and 2021 put the true rate of CTE at death somewhere between 24.5% and 97.7% for the most recent six years, a range wide enough to show how little the headline 93% figure actually settles.
Vapes beat patches and gum for quitting, Cochrane finds
Cochrane's updated living review of 80 trials and 29,861 people gives high-certainty evidence that nicotine e-cigarettes help more adult smokers quit than patches or gum, with serious side effects rare in every group.