An international team of researchers has reviewed the latest advances in multimodal artificial intelligence (AI) for cardiovascular diseases (CVD), highlighting its superior diagnostic accuracy, risk prediction, and therapeutic guidance compared with traditional single-data approaches. The review outlines how integrating imaging, genomics, electronic health records, and wearable data into unified AI models can enable earlier diagnosis, personalized therapy, and continuous remote monitoring, heralding a new era of precision cardiology.

A large-scale genetic study comparing Chinese and UK patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) reveals significant ethnic differences in rare variant burden and specific mutations, highlighting the need for ancestry-aware genetic diagnostics and personalized medicine.

AlphaFold 3 (AF3), the latest AI model from Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, can predict the structures and interactions of nearly all biomolecules with unprecedented accuracy, opening new avenues for drug design, vaccine development, and precision medicine.

A 6-year cohort study conducted by researchers from Japan, comprising nearly 39,000 older adults found that people living in rental flats and owner-occupied detached houses face higher risks of cardiovascular death compared with those in owner-occupied flats. The study attributes to the increased risk to colder, less stable indoor temperatures in these housing types and suggests that improving housing quality to address these issues could lower cardiovascular mortality, particularly among men.

Recently, a research team led by Professor Wenfeng Cong from China Agricultural University, in collaboration with Dr. Wopke van der Werf from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, revealed the changing trends of dietary zinc intake among Chinese adults and the underlying reasons by analyzing data from China Health and Nutrition Surveys conducted between 2004 and 2011. The study covered 21,266 adults aged 18–50 from 9 provinces and 3 municipalities directly under the central government in China. The results showed that from 2004 to 2011, the average daily zinc intake of Chinese adults decreased from 11.1 to 9.89 mg, and the proportion of people with insufficient intake increased from 23% to 37%, a growth of more than 60%. Notably, this trend was prevalent across different income groups—although the zinc intake of high-income groups was consistently higher than that of low-income groups, zinc intake in all income strata showed a downward trend. The related paper has been published in Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering (DOI: 10.15302/J-FASE-2024584).

Relative weights analyses showed the neglect/interference/punishment domain contributed most significantly (28.78%) to behavior problems in preschool children with developmental disabilities.

Stress sensitivity increases the frequency, intensity, and variability of suicidal thoughts among the university community. These are the findings of a longitudinal study coordinated by the Hospital del Mar Research Institute and Pompeu Fabra University, which analyses survey data from more than 700 university students. The study defines, for the first time, three degrees of passive suicidal ideation according to their frequency, intensity and increasing variability. Taking stress sensitivity into account could have an impact on suicide prevention.