Tossing and turning more as you age? You’re not alone — and experts think they know why.

Dr. Shelby Harris, a sleep psychologist in White Plains, N.Y., explained that stress, sleep structure and hormonal changes can impact sleep as people age.

“As we start to move into our 60s, 70s, you have more issues with the depth of your sleep, so your sleep is just lighter in general,” Harris told CBS News. “There’s sleep disorders, like insomnia, that happens, and then you have to go to the bathroom more at night.”

Research shows up to 70% of people 65 and older have chronic sleep problems, and hormonal shifts play a big role in that, especially for women.

“We have more hot flashes, night sweats. You actually have more sleep apnea in women as well, and just more insomnia too,” Harris said.

There may also be some evolutionary reasoning behind why older adults get less deep sleep, Harris added.

“The deepest stage of sleep is where your muscles are repairing, you’re growing — and as you’re getting older, you don’t need that ideally as much as you do when you’re younger,” Harris said, adding that younger kids get a lot of deep sleep.

“(Older adults) just wake up a lot more because of pain and movement and having to urinate,” she added.

What’s more, Harris told CBS News it’s a myth that older adults don’t need much sleep.

“If a doctor tells you that is normal to get a lot less as you get older, definitely seek some other advice,” Harris said.

Along with keeping a cool, dark and quiet sleep environment, she offered these tips:

Meditate during the day. “If you have a busy brain, meditating five minutes during the day can help to actually ease your brain more at night,” Harris said.

Limit daytime sleep. To try and get better sleep at night, you can also try spending less time in bed during the day, Harris added. That means reducing naps.

Stick to a regular bedtime.

If sleep issues last more than a few weeks, it’s important to talk with a doctor, Harris urged.

“We do have a lot of treatments like cognitive behavior therapy for insomnia, you might need a sleep study, medication,” she said. “We have lots of options.”

Summary: A new study reveals that Heschl’s gyrus, once thought to only process sound, actually plays a crucial role in interpreting speech melody, or prosody. Researchers tracked brain activity in epilepsy patients with implanted electrodes and found that this region encodes pitch accents as meaningful linguistic signals, separate from word sounds.

This discovery challenges long-held assumptions that prosody processing occurs later in the brain and suggests that humans uniquely extract meaning from pitch variations. The findings could improve speech therapy, AI voice recognition, and our understanding of language disorders.

Key Facts

• Early Prosody Processing: Heschl’s gyrus encodes pitch accents before higher speech centers process meaning.
• Unique Human Ability: Unlike non-human primates, humans abstract pitch changes into meaningful language cues.
• Real-World Applications: These insights could advance speech therapy, AI voice recognition, and linguistic research.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” and now, science backs it up. A first-of-its-kind study from Northwestern University’s School of Communication, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Wisconsin-Madison reveals a region of the brain, long known for early auditory processing, plays a far greater role in interpreting speech than previously understood. 

The multidisciplinary study being published Monday, March 3 in the journal Nature Communications found a brain region known as Heschl’s gyrus doesn’t just process sounds — it transforms subtle changes in pitch, known as prosody, into meaningful linguistic information that guides how humans understand emphasis, intent and focus in conversation.

For years, scientists believed that all aspects of prosody were primarily processed in the superior temporal gyrus, a brain region known for speech perception. Bharath Chandrasekaran, the study’s co-principal investigator and professor and chair of the Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern, said the findings challenge long-held assumptions about how, where and the speed at which prosody is processed in the brain.

“The results redefine our understanding of the architecture of speech perception,” Chandrasekaran said.

“We’ve spent a few decades researching the nuances of how speech is abstracted in the brain, but this is the first study to investigate how subtle variations in pitch that also communicate meaning is processed in the brain.”

Rare set of research participants 

Chandrasekaran partnered with Dr. Taylor Abel, chief of pediatric neurosurgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to study auditory information processing in 11 adolescent patients who were receiving neurosurgery treatment for severe epilepsy. They all had electrodes implanted deep in the cortex of the brain that is critical for key language function.

“Typically, communication and linguistics research rely on non-invasive recordings from the surface of the skin, which makes it accessible but not very precise,” Abel said.

“A collaboration between neurosurgeon-scientists and neuroscientists, like ours, allowed us to collect high-quality recordings of brain activity that would not have been possible otherwise, and learn about the mechanisms of brain processing in a completely new way.”

To explore how the brain deciphers the melody of speech, researchers worked with the rare group of patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains as part of epilepsy treatment. While these patients actively listened to an audiobook recording of “Alice in Wonderland,” scientists tracked activity in multiple brain regions in real time.

What researchers found 

Using the intracerebral recordings from the electrodes deep in the patient’s brain, researchers noted the Heschl’s gyrus section processed subtle changes in voice pitch — not just as sound, but as meaningful linguistic units. The brain encoded pitch accents separately from the sounds that make up words.

“Our study challenges the long-standing assumptions how and where the brain picks up on the natural melody in speech — those subtle pitch changes that help convey meaning and intent,” said G. Nike Gnanataja of UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders and co-first author of the study.

“Even though these pitch patterns vary each time we speak, our brains create stable representations to understand them.”

Gnanataja says the research also revealed that the hidden layer of meaning carried by prosodic contours — the rise and fall of speech — is encoded much earlier in auditory processing than previously thought.

Similar research was conducted in non-human primates, but researchers found those brains lacked this abstraction, despite processing the same acoustic cues.

Why it matters 

By unlocking the hidden layer of speech, Chandrasekaran and his team discovered how the brain processes pitch accents, revealing profound implications for various fields.

“Our findings could transform speech rehabilitation, AI-powered voice assistants, and our understanding of what makes human communication unique,” he said.

Understanding early prosodic processing could lead to new interventions for speech and language disorders, such as autism, dysprosody in patients who have had a stroke, and language-based learning differences.

The study also highlights the unique role of linguistic experience in human communication, as non-human primates lack the ability to process pitch accents as abstract categories.

Additionally, these findings could significantly enhance AI-driven voice recognition systems by enabling them to better handle prosody, bringing natural language processing closer to mimicking human speech perception.

Funding: The research is supported by NIH grant 5R01DC13315-11 awarded by the National Institute of Health and is a product of an ongoing research project titled “Cortical contributions to frequency-following response generation and modulation,” co-principal investigators Bharath Chandrasekaran, Taylor Abel, Srivatsun Sadagopan, Tobias Teichert.

The research was also supported by NIH grant R21DC019217-01A1 awarded to Taylor Abel; and the Vice-Chancellors Research and Graduate Education, and College of Letters and Sciences UW Madison Funds to G. Nike Gnanateja.

More than half of all adults and a third of children, teenagers and young adults around the world are predicted to be overweight or obese by 2050.

The findings come in a new study of global data published in The Lancet journal, covering more than 200 countries.

Researchers warn that obesity levels are predicted to accelerate rapidly during the remainder of this decade, particularly in lower-income countries.

However, experts say that if governments take urgent action now, there is still time to prevent what they describe as a “profound tragedy”.

By 2021, almost half the global adult population – a billion men and 1.11 billion women aged 25 or older – were overweight or obese.

The proportion of both men and women living with these conditions has doubled since 1990.

If trends continue, global rates of overweight and obese adults would rise to about 57.4% for men and 60.3% for women by 2050.

In terms of raw numbers, China (627 million), India (450 million) and the USA (214 million) will be the countries with the biggest populations of overweight or obese people in 2050.

However, population growth means that forecasters are predicting the number in sub-Saharan Africa will rise by more than 250% to 522 million.

Nigeria, in particular, stands out, with the predicted number projected to more than triple – from 36.6 million in 2021 to 141 million in 2050. That would make it the country with the fourth-largest population of adults who are overweight or obese.

The authors acknowledge the study does not take into account the impact that new weight loss medications might have – and they could play a significant role in the future.

Experts say if governments take urgent action now, there is still time to prevent what could be a disaster for vulnerable healthcare systems.

The research was led by Prof Emmanuela Gakidou, from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), at the University of Washington in the US.

She said: “[Governments] can use our country specific estimates on the stage, timing, and speed of current and forecasted transitions in weight to identify priority populations experiencing the greatest burdens of obesity who require immediate intervention and treatment, and those that remain predominantly overweight and should be primarily targeted with prevention strategies.

“The unprecedented global epidemic of overweight and obesity is a profound tragedy and a monumental societal failure,” she added.

A surge in rates of obesity is happening right now, particularly among young people.

Rates of obesity in children and younger teenagers (from 8.8% to 18.1%) and younger adults (those under 25 – from 9.9% to 20.3%) more than doubled between 1990 and 2021.

However, by 2050 one in three young people will be affected.

The co-lead author of the report, Dr Jessica Kerr of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia, says the figures present a real challenge to health care systems in the coming years.

“But if we act now, preventing a complete transition to global obesity for children and adolescents is still possible,” she said.

“Our estimates identify children and adolescents in much of Europe and south Asia living with overweight who should be targeted with obesity prevention strategies.

“We have also identified large populations, particularly adolescent girls, in North America, Australasia, Oceania, North Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America that are expected to tip over to obesity predominance and require urgent, multifaceted intervention and treatment.

“This is essential to avoid intergenerational transmission of obesity and to prevent a wave of serious health conditions and dire financial and societal costs for future generations.”

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the top health official in the United States who is known for his scepticism of vaccines, has backed the measles jab amid a deadly outbreak of the infectious disease in Texas.

In an opinion piece published by Fox News on Sunday, Kennedy said he was “deeply concerned” about the spread of the disease despite earlier suggesting that it was “not unusual”.

“Vaccines not only protect individual children from measles, but also contribute to community immunity, protecting those who are unable to be vaccinated due to medical reasons,” Kennedy wrote, though he said the decision to vaccinate is “a personal one”.

The US secretary of health and human services said that before the introduction of the MMR vaccine, “virtually every child” in the US contracted measles.

“For example, in the United States, from 1953 to 1962, on average there were 530,217 confirmed cases and 440 deaths, a case fatality rate of 1 in 1,205 cases,” he wrote.

US authorities last month reported the first measles death in the country in a decade after an unvaccinated school-aged child was hospitalised with the disease in northwest Texas.

As of Friday, 146 cases had been identified in the state since late January, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Health officials have said the cases have been concentrated in a community of Mennonites, a Christian sect that arose out of the radical factions of the 16th-century Reformation.

Kennedy, who has promoted scientifically discredited research linking vaccines to autism, attracted criticism last month when he appeared to downplay the outbreak by pointing out there had been several outbreaks already this year.

Measles can be highly dangerous for people who are not vaccinated, including young infants who are not typically eligible for immunisation.

About one in five unvaccinated individuals in the US who gets measles is hospitalised, while about one out of every 20 children with the disease gets pneumonia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2023, neurologists at a memory clinic in China diagnosed a 19-year-old with what they believed to be Alzheimer’s disease, making him the youngest person ever to be diagnosed with the condition in the world.

The male teenager began experiencing memory decline around age 17, and the cognitive losses only worsened over the years.

Imaging of the patient’s brain showed shrinkage in the hippocampus, which is involved in memory, and his cerebrospinal fluid hinted at common markers of this most common form of dementia.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is often thought of as an old person’s ailment, and yet early-onset cases, which include patients under the age of 65, account for up to 10 percent of all diagnoses.

Almost all patients under 30 years of age can have their Alzheimer’s explained by pathological gene mutations, putting them into the category of familial Alzheimer’s disease (FAD). The younger a person is when they receive a diagnosis, the more likely it is the result of a faulty gene they’ve inherited.

Yet researchers at the Capital Medical University in Beijing couldn’t find any of the usual mutations responsible for the early onset of memory loss, nor any suspect genes when they performed a genome-wide search.

Before this diagnosis in China, the youngest patient with Alzheimer’s was 21 years old. They carried the PSEN1 gene mutation, which causes abnormal proteins to build up in the brain, forming clumps of toxic plaques, a common feature of Alzheimer’s.

Cases like the one in China pose something of a mystery. None of the 19-year-old’s family had a history of Alzheimer’s or dementia, making it hard to categorize as FAD, yet the teenager had no other diseases, infections, or head trauma that could explain his sudden cognitive decline either.

Two years before being referred to the memory clinic, the teenage patient began struggling to focus in class. Reading also became difficult and his short-term memory declined. Oftentimes, he couldn’t remember events from the day before, and he was always misplacing his belongings.

Ultimately, the cognitive decline became so bad, the young man was unable to finish high school, although he could still live independently.

A year after being referred to the memory clinic, he showed losses in immediate recall, short-delay recall after three minutes, and long-delay recall after 30 minutes.

The patient’s full-scale memory score was 82 percent lower than that of peers his own age, while his immediate memory score was 87 percent lower.

Long-term follow-up is needed to support the young man’s diagnosis, but his medical team said at the time the patient was “altering our understanding of the typical age of onset of AD.”

“The patient had very early-onset AD with no clear pathogenic mutations,” neurologist Jianping Jia and colleagues wrote in their study, “which suggests that its pathogenesis still needs to be explored.”

The case study, published in February 2023, just goes to show that Alzheimer’s doesn’t follow a single pathway, and is much more complex than we thought, emerging via numerous avenues with varying effects.

In a statement to the South China Morning Post, the neurologists who described the patient’s case argued that future studies should focus on early-onset cases to further improve our understanding of memory loss.

“Exploring the mysteries of young people with Alzheimer’s disease may become one of the most challenging scientific questions of the future,” they said.

The study was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease.

An earlier version of this article was published in February 2023.

This year’s flu season has been miserable and is proving to be among the worst in decades. Now there are growing worries about next year’s flu vaccinations.

This week, the Food and Drug Administration — now with vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm — unexpectedly and without reason canceled a March meeting of scientists who advise the FDA on vaccine policy. A similar meeting at the Centers for Disease Control was postponed last week.

Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm, the head of the University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, joined Morning Edition host Cathy Wurzer to talk about the implications of axing the meeting.

Timelines for flu vaccines are tight. Why do cancellations of these March meetings matter?

It takes about six months for the virus that scientists use for the vaccine to grow. It’s then available in late summer or early fall.

“It’s like planting a garden,” Osterholm said. “If you postpone it two months, you might be in trouble when you can harvest, and if you can harvest it at all.”

The timeline is already tight to make an educated estimation on what flu strains will be a problem next year, and the virus can change between now and then.

“But this is our best guess and our best attempt to give us the best match for the virus circulating next winter and what’s in the vaccine,” he said.

Since the vaccine is often grown in chicken eggs, could bird flu affect development?

The short answer is no. And Osterholm said this is some good news among the bad.

“Right after 9/11, when we had so many concerns about terrorism and so forth happening, the U.S. government took extra effort, along with the vaccine manufacturers, to secure the facilities where these chickens actually lay the eggs,” Osterholm said.

The eggs used by scientists are embryonated, meaning they’re fertilized and growing a fetal chicken. The chickens are raised under tight biosecurity.

“The buildings are airtight with special filters,” Osterholm explained. “And so we feel pretty confident that even if a H5N1 situation is occurring in the region where these egg-producing locations are at, we’re still in really good shape.”

Can the vaccines be manufactured without FDA or CDC panel guidance?

The panels evaluate what’s been happening with the flu in the southern hemisphere. The strains circulating there typically predict what’s likely to happen in the U.S. four to five months later, according to Osterholm.

“And without those kind of data, we can’t do that,” he said. “It’s not just something casually done saying, ‘Ah, let’s just go with that one, OK?’ Now there really is a major effort made to come up with the closest match we can. So this timing and the meetings themselves are very, very important.”

If the federal government scales back mass vaccination, how could people still get shots?

“At this point, we are really in the worst place I’ve been in my 50-year career in terms of vaccine preventable diseases,” Osterholm said.

Several state governments, in line with Kennedy, are increasingly identifying as anti-vaccine. For example, the Surgeon General of Louisiana recently issued a statement saying the state department of health no longer supports vaccine campaigns for children — and for parents that want them, to seek immunizations out independently. In Texas and New Mexico, there’s a worsening outbreak of measles, which the U.S. declared eliminated back in 2000. However, dropping rates of MMR vaccines for kids are bringing the disease out of the shadows.

“And so there is this ever-creeping concern coming into the vaccine picture of people who are not getting vaccinated,” Osterholm continued. “We have a real battle on our hands right now in terms of helping the public understand what will happen if they’re not vaccinating their kids. What this means is this is not without a consequence. So you may think you’re making a moral choice. We’re also making a choice that can end up killing your child.”

Osterholm also pointed out that federal governments in the past have been a leader in the discussion, calling it “unfortunate” that it’s not the present case.

Can states continue vaccine programs if the federal government stops dispersing shots?

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices’ meeting was canceled recently. When the group makes a recommendation on vaccines, it’s affirmed by the CDC and triggers a sequence of events, including covering child vaccination programs.

“Without that, you basically don’t have a mechanism for paying for these vaccines, and so it’s a much larger issue than just telling parents that this is a good thing to do,” Osterholm explained. “It also makes the wheels of public health turn.”

Many state and local health departments in the U.S. have immunization programs largely supported by federal dollars. Osterholm is concerned that there’ll be a mass reduction in these programs under the Trump Administration. He also expects hefty layoffs at the CDC in the coming weeks, which will directly impact local health programs.

“The whole system right now is devolving into, frankly, a black hole,” he said. “I am incredibly, incredibly concerned that we’re going to see a major erosion in [vaccination] for children in this country over the next year or two, and it will absolutely result in major outbreaks.”

Are you worried about pandemic readiness, should one occur?

“Everyone has to understand the pandemic clock is ticking. We just don’t know what time it is,” Osterholm warned, underlining there will be more pandemics — and they could be worse than COVID-19.

“Are we prepared for this? Absolutely not,” he said. “We have so many lessons that should have and could have been learned from what we went through with COVID that no one really ever took the time in federal governments or organizations to really review that.”

“I fear that we’re going to go into the next pandemic… not any better prepared,” Osterholm continued. “But more importantly, we have a public now that distrusts public health unlike any time in modern history.”

They aren’t meant to be suggestions. Expiration dates on medications matter. They’re clearly marked. Drugs, like food, have a shelf life.

Sterling Elliott is a clinical pharmacist with Northwestern Medicine.

“Those expiration dates are put there because the manufacturer knows that’s the point in time where after that, the potency of the drug can be reduced. It may not work as well for you,” Elliot said.

Expiration dates vary depending on the form — pills, capsules and liquids stay stable for different lengths of time. The danger comes when drugs lose their potency.

“If you are not feeling well, some nausea and vomiting, maybe some dizziness, or you notice, for instance, if you took expired blood pressure medication and you check your blood pressure at home, you might notice that your blood pressure is rising a little more than it was,” Elliot said. “It has the risk of worsening the condition that you are trying to treat.”

The dates also apply to common over-the-counter medications such as pain relievers and cold medicines — even herbal supplements. Where and how you store a drug also factors in.

“That’s a situation where the light can cause the active drug to break down or the drug is stable when it’s refrigerated, but if you are at room temp you lose that stability,” he said.

When it’s time to dispose of a medication, don’t flush it. The chemicals will end up in the water supply. Instead, look for drug take-back programs or disposal kiosks like this one provided by the DEA.

“You put it in the kiosk, and that’s a secure way to dispose of it, and then those items are removed, and they are eventually burned in a control environment, so it’s not released in the air,” he said.

At-home options include charcoal kits that deactivate critical ingredients: just add water and toss it in the trash.

“In the case if it’s an opioid, there’s the potential for misuse and addiction and it’s probably not the Norco you thought it was,” he said.

Drug disposal boxes can be found at pharmacies, fire stations, hospitals and municipal buildings. If you’d like to locate one in your area, you can visit https://safe.pharmacy/drug-disposal

Very few painkillers are safe to use during pregnancy, and yet one of the only available options has become embroiled in an international debate in recent years.

Acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol, is generally considered to be the safest painkiller to use during pregnancy, and yet emerging research that has linked the drug to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder ( ADHD) suggests there may be overlooked risks to early brain development.

In a small new study, researchers in the US tracked bloodstream levels of acetaminophen in 307 Black women during their pregnancy. They found those who used acetaminophen later gave birth to children more than three times as likely to receive an ADHD diagnosis.

For daughters, exposure to acetaminophen in the womb was linked to a more than six-fold increase in the risk of ADHD within the first ten years of life.

While that sounds concerning on the surface, these initial results are not conclusive and should not scare off the large percentage of people who rely on acetaminophen during pregnancy for pain or fever. Especially since robust evidence shows both of those symptoms can be threats to a developing fetus if left untreated.

As with any medicine, the benefits of acetaminophen must be balanced by the risks. Unlike its pros, however, the long-term cons are not as well researched.

“This medication was… approved decades ago, and may need reevaluation by the FDA,” argues pediatrician Sheela Sathyanarayana from UW Medicine.

“Acetaminophen was never evaluated for fetal exposures in relation to long-term neurodevelopmental impacts.”

In recent years, several other epidemiology studies have found associations between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and ADHD outcomes in children, and yet some studies have produced conflicting results. All of these investigations are purely correlational and their findings are not a cause for alarm, some scientists argue, but rather, alertness.

Nevertheless, lead author Brennan Baker, from Seattle Children’s Research Institute, thinks it may be time for the FDA to take another look at acetaminophen’s safety during pregnancy.

The last time the FDA did so was in 2015, when officials declared there was inconclusive evidence to connect acetaminophen use in pregnancy and ADHD in children.

“[Acetaminophen] is an important medication and alternatives for treatment of high fever and severe pain are limited,” they wrote in a Consensus Statement for Nature Reviews Endocrinology in 2021.

In response to the 2021 commentary, officials at ACOG held firm.

“Neurodevelopmental disorders, in particular, are multifactorial and very difficult to associate with a singular cause. The brain does not stop developing until at least 15 months of age, which leaves room for children to be exposed to a number of factors that could potentially lead to these issues,” they wrote in 2021.

“The conflicting results means that more research is needed,” says Baker.

The study was published in Nature Mental Health.

A health expert has issued a stark warning about a certain type of carbohydrate that could be wreaking havoc on your blood sugar levels, claiming it’s “more dangerous than sugar” and can cause significant spikes. Dr Eric Berg DC delved into the dangers of maltodextrin on blood sugar.

Dr Berg is a renowned specialist in ketosis and intermittent fasting with a YouTube following exceeding 13 million. He is also the author of the best-selling book ‘The Healthy Keto Plan’ and Director of Dr Berg Nutritionals.

Ketosis, the metabolic state where fat is burned for energy over glucose, is associated with numerous health benefits, including weight loss, better blood sugar management, and a reduced risk of heart disease. It’s also known to curb hunger, boost energy levels, and enhance skin health, reports Surrey Live.

In a recent video, Dr Berg pointed out how those looking to maintain stable blood sugar should steer clear of maltodextrin. “There is this carb that is way more dangerous than sugar,” he said. “Now, people tend to think sugar is the worst, but there are other things that are even worse than sugar.”

He continued to explain the severity of its impact by referencing the glycemic index. He said: “This specific carb is bad, and I’m going to tell you why. Let’s take a look at the glycemic index, where is sugar? Well, table sugar is about 65, not terribly high. Where’s glucose? 100. Where is this carbohydrate? Between 116 and 136 on the glycemic index.

“So in other words, it’s a carb that’s not classified as a sugar, but acts like a sugar in a much more deadly way. As far as what it can do to your blood sugars, it just will really spike it. And this carb is called maltodextrin.”

Maltodextrin is found in many diet staples. Dr Berg said: “It’s in other forms, too. It’s in modified food starch and modified corn starch. It’s in many foods. They put it in a lot of sugar-free products as ‘no sugar’, even though it really, to me, it is a sugar.”

The video concluded with essential advice for viewers: “So start reading the labels and avoid maltodextrin.” But what exactly is maltodextrin, what does it feature in, and should consumers be wary?

ST. LOUIS — For decades, researchers have searched for effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, a devastating neurodegenerative condition that affects memory, thinking, and the ability to perform everyday activities. The recent approval of new medications offers a glimmer of hope, but questions remain about how much these treatments actually help patients in meaningful ways. A new study from the Washington University School of Medicine provides a fresh perspective on this question, focusing on what matters most to patients and their families: maintaining independence in daily life.

When pharmaceutical companies test new Alzheimer’s treatments, they typically measure success using clinical scales that may not translate clearly to real-world benefits. The Clinical Dementia Rating Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB) is one such scale frequently used in clinical trials. But what does a small improvement on this scale actually mean for patients and their families? Does it translate to more time living independently? More days being able to manage finances, drive, or prepare meals?

These questions drove researchers to conduct a detailed analysis examining how scores on clinical tests relate to practical outcomes that patients and families deeply value—specifically, how long people can maintain independence in their daily activities. Their findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions provide a new framework for understanding treatment benefits.