COIOS — International risk research catalyst focused on medical advances, behavioural insights and data science
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- 2 trackers refreshed
- Releases this week
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Official figures
Where the evidence stands
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building mixedRevisions and new sources
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building strengtheningInnovation in treatment
Treatments that did not exist before — drugs, operations, devices — and whether they reach the people who would benefit.
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established mixedDiet, exercise and sleep
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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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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building strengtheningObesity, diabetes and GLP-1
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 strengtheningWhat linked data reveals
What linked registries are making it possible to know about whole populations
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emerging mixedMedicine at a distance
What wearables, remote monitoring and care at home add to how health is measured and delivered, and whether it shows in outcomes.
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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.
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established steadyInfection and pandemics
Infectious disease and pandemics: understanding both the risks and how well prepared we are
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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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established mixedAlcohol and drug use
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.
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building mixedHeart and stroke
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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established strengtheningA changing climate
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 mixedForecasts and their record
How the numbers are made, how much they revise their own past, and how well mortality can be forecast — and by whom.
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building mixedAdherence and persistence
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established mixedMental health
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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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emerging mixedSlowing ageing itself
Whether anything yet slows ageing itself, rather than treating one disease at a time, and how we would know if it did.
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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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emerging mixedValue in health
What a treatment, programme or policy is worth against what it costs, and how far the models that decide it can be trusted.
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building strengtheningChanging 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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building mixedFrailty and multimorbidity
Whether the years added after 85 are healthy ones, how frailty and multiple conditions are measured, and where the limits of the data lie.
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established strengtheningHealth funding and inequalities
Whether inequalities in health and length of life are widening, where, and what is happening to health at working ages.
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Item new peer-reviewed
One in nine older US cannabis users meets criteria for cannabis use disorder
In the 2021-2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 8.9% of US adults aged 65 and over had used cannabis in the past year, and 11.4% of those met DSM-5 criteria for cannabis use disorder, 76.0% of them at mild severity.
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Item new preprint
Uncertainty in a biological age estimate predicts mortality independently of the age gap
A probabilistic framework applied to more than 450,000 UK Biobank participants derived both a biological age gap and a biological age uncertainty from the width of predicted-age distributions, with uncertainty only weakly correlated with the gap and independently associated with mortality.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Hepatitis B cure at 30% efficacy modelled as cost-effective below $46,642 in the US
A Markov model comparing a hypothetical hepatitis B functional-cure regimen with long-term nucleos(t)ide analogue therapy found gains of 0.30 QALYs per patient in the US and 0.57 in China, cost-effective at one-off prices below USD46,642 and USD13,008 respectively.
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Data new peer-reviewed
Zambia's mobile death notification lifted registration completeness from 11.9% to 17.4%
An electronic version of Zambia's Form 13 death notification, used in burial offices across Lusaka, Central, Copperbelt and Southern provinces, captured 115,573 deaths in six months and raised estimated completeness from 11.9% to 17.4% while cutting mean reporting delay from six days to three.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Oral GLP-1 agonist safiglipron cut HbA1c by up to 1.45 points in type 2 diabetes
In the OUTSTAND-1 randomised placebo-controlled trial, the once-daily oral small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist safiglipron reduced HbA1c by up to 1.45 percentage points over 32 weeks in people with type 2 diabetes not taking glucose-lowering medication, with modest effects on body weight.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Oral GLP-1 agonist safiglipron cut HbA1c by up to 1.45 points in type 2 diabetes
In the OUTSTAND-1 randomised placebo-controlled trial, the once-daily oral small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist safiglipron reduced HbA1c by up to 1.45 percentage points over 32 weeks in people with type 2 diabetes not taking glucose-lowering medication, with modest effects on body weight.
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Item refines preprint
APOE e4 dementia and liver associations differ by ancestry in 367,757 US adults
A phenome-wide study of APOE genotype in 367,757 All of Us participants found 27 associated phenotypes, with dementia risk largest in those of European ancestry and e4 protection against fatty liver disease present in East Asians but absent in African-ancestry participants.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Heart-focused anxiety was clinically elevated in 15% to 49% across 26 cardiac studies
A systematic review of 26 studies found clinically elevated heart-focused anxiety in 15% to 49% of patients with cardiovascular disease, and two prospective cohorts reported independent prediction of cardiac events and death after myocardial infarction (hazard ratios 1.30 to 1.59).
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Item refines preprint
US mortality after CPR for in-hospital cardiac arrest stayed above pre-2020 levels
In 612,930 weighted US hospitalisations with CPR for in-hospital cardiac arrest, risk-adjusted mortality fell to 2019, peaked in 2021 (aOR 1.26 against 2016) and stayed above pre-pandemic levels in 2022, and it was higher for Black, Hispanic and self-pay patients.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Lithium users had about 37% lower dementia risk across four pooled cohort studies
A meta-analysis of 23 studies pooled four cohort studies to a hazard ratio of 0.63 (95% CI 0.52 to 0.78) for dementia with lithium exposure, though heterogeneity was substantial and the authors state that causality is not established.
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Item new peer-reviewed
One in nine older US cannabis users meets criteria for cannabis use disorder
In the 2021-2024 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 8.9% of US adults aged 65 and over had used cannabis in the past year, and 11.4% of those met DSM-5 criteria for cannabis use disorder, 76.0% of them at mild severity.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Loneliness carries most of the social signal for psychological distress
Across 48,377 respondents in 29 European countries and prospective US Health and Retirement Study waves, loneliness had the largest association with psychological distress of the social measures tested, with all other social variables adding a cross-validated AUC gain of only 0.006.
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Item new preprint
Recurrent unpaid caregiving was linked to higher smoking and lower inactivity odds
A latent class analysis of 25,049 UK Household Longitudinal Study participants across waves 2 to 13 found that people moving repeatedly into and out of unpaid caregiving had higher odds of smoking (OR 1.67) but lower odds of physical inactivity (OR 0.65) and problematic drinking (OR 0.75).
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Brief tobacco intervention lowered risk scores in Indian guards, fading by day 90
In a randomised trial among 86 male security personnel at a North Indian tertiary hospital, a WHO ASSIST-linked brief intervention reduced tobacco risk scores relative to general health information, with a group-by-time effect size of 0.34 and dependence differences weakening by day 90.
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Item new preprint
Offering HPV vaccine at 9-10 raised series completion by age 13 from 45% to 62%
In a cluster-randomised trial across 31 US paediatric practices, introducing HPV vaccination at ages 9-10 rather than 11-12 brought median series completion forward from 13.3 to 12.2 years and raised completion by age 13 from 45.1% to 61.6%.
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Item new peer-reviewed
Hepatitis B cure at 30% efficacy modelled as cost-effective below $46,642 in the US
A Markov model comparing a hypothetical hepatitis B functional-cure regimen with long-term nucleos(t)ide analogue therapy found gains of 0.30 QALYs per patient in the US and 0.57 in China, cost-effective at one-off prices below USD46,642 and USD13,008 respectively.
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Data new peer-reviewed
Zambia's mobile death notification lifted registration completeness from 11.9% to 17.4%
An electronic version of Zambia's Form 13 death notification, used in burial offices across Lusaka, Central, Copperbelt and Southern provinces, captured 115,573 deaths in six months and raised estimated completeness from 11.9% to 17.4% while cutting mean reporting delay from six days to three.
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Item refines preprint
Modelled excess maternal deaths of 68,489 in 2020-2023, with a wide uncertainty interval
Counterfactual models fitted to WHO/UN maternal mortality estimates for 2000-2019 put cumulative excess maternal deaths across 195 countries at 68,489 (95% UI 34,706-147,118) for 2020-2023, with no clear association with national service-disruption measures.
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Item confirms peer-reviewed
Lower education was the most consistent socioeconomic correlate of obesity in Korea
A cross-sectional analysis of the 2022-2024 wave of the Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found lower educational attainment the most consistent socioeconomic correlate of obesity (BMI 25 or above) in adults aged 19 and over, with income and employment less consistent.
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Item new preprint
Fine-tuned LLM beat ICD codes for in-hospital cardiac arrest on a curated corpus
Large language models reading clinical notes identified in-hospital cardiac arrest with precision 0.88 and recall 1.00 on a curated corpus against 0.68 and 0.91 for ICD codes, though a prompting configuration reached precision 0.79 in an unselected cohort of 45,525 encounters.
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Item new preprint
Uncertainty in a biological age estimate predicts mortality independently of the age gap
A probabilistic framework applied to more than 450,000 UK Biobank participants derived both a biological age gap and a biological age uncertainty from the width of predicted-age distributions, with uncertainty only weakly correlated with the gap and independently associated with mortality.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Korea's 2025-26 avian flu season carried diverse H5Nx genotypes, one of European origin
Genomic surveillance of 62 poultry outbreaks and 63 wild bird detections in Korea during winter 2025-26 found extensive clade 2.3.4.4b reassortment, including the European H5N1 genotype EA-2024-DI.2.1 that spread across Europe in 2025, alongside novel H5N1 and H5N9 poultry genotypes.
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Item refines peer-reviewed
Pacemaker after cardiac surgery carries modestly higher long-term mortality in Sweden
Among 76 223 Swedish adults undergoing cardiac surgery between 2006 and 2020, the 2.8% who received a permanent pacemaker within 30 days had a 9% higher adjusted risk of all-cause death and a 36% higher risk of heart failure hospitalisation over a mean 6.8 years.
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Item new preprint
Wastewater sequencing in Lagos found enteric viruses, cholera and mcr resistance genes
Virus-enriched sequencing of untreated wastewater from open drainage canals in Lagos over July and August 2024 recovered a human virome dominated by enteric adenoviruses, astroviruses and caliciviruses, alongside Vibrio cholerae and mcr resistance genes.
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Item refines preprint
Immunosuppressed people are less protected than their antibody levels would suggest
A meta-analysis of antibody responses to mRNA COVID-19 vaccination found binding antibody levels 54.5-fold lower in people on B-cell depleting therapy than in healthy controls, and protection against infection and hospitalisation lower at any given antibody level.
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Releases this week
Next seven days: ONS weekly deaths (Wed 30); ONS Deaths of homeless people in England and Wales (Thu 1); ONS Population estimates for the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland (Thu 1); ONS Unexplained deaths in infancy, England and Wales (Thu 1); and 4 more. Full calendar