Exhaustion, trauma and the harsh realities of parenting are driving more Australian families to think twice about having another child.

A King’s College London study, published in Nature Communications, offers insight into how long-term inflammation may contribute to cognitive decline in disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, aging, depression and the lingering neurological effects of viral infections.

A single night of sleep testing may not be enough to diagnose sleep apnea, with new Flinders University research revealing that night-to-night variation can lead to missed or incorrect diagnoses. The study, published in npj Digital Medicine, found that analyzing sleep over multiple nights may provide a more accurate picture of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), challenging the longstanding reliance on one-night sleep studies.

What makes the human brain capable of language, imagination, mathematics and invention? For many years, the prevailing view was that the secret of human intelligence lay mainly in scale: the sheer number of neurons in the human brain—close to 100 billion—and the vast network of connections among them. But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that part of the answer may lie at a much smaller scale: in the extraordinary computational power of individual brain cells.

A new study from Mass General Brigham, Boston University and the Concussion & CTE Foundation found that National Football League (NFL) players had higher rates of neurodegenerative disease-caused mortality than the general population. A cohort study of nearly 20,000 NFL players revealed that, while players had lower mortality on average compared with national rates, they were four times more likely to experience neurodegenerative mortality. Results are published in eClinicalMedicine.