Understanding how the efficacy of some widely used drugs—such as antidiabetics, chemotherapies, or bronchodilators—could depend on the patient's sex helped, in the long term, to reduce the risk of adverse effects.

“With this work, we opened the door to a precision medicine that no longer assumed that what worked for men necessarily worked for women.”

Similar – yet not the same: Many studies show that patients often struggle to interpret numerical information in medical contexts, especially probabilities related to recovery and side effects. In a recently published Letter in the prestigious journal JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), Professors Tobias Kube (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Winfried Rief (University of Marburg) explain which phrasing can help prevent nocebo effects in communication in outpatient and clinical settings.

More than 50 million U.S. workers quit during the “Great Resignation,” due to burnout and weak benefits. Now, a first-of-its-kind study shows paid time off is a powerful driver of retention. Drawing on 18 years of data and 32,000 early-career workers, the analysis finds that one to five PTO days barely reduce resignations. Meaningful declines begin at six to 10 days, with the strongest effects at 11 or more days, significantly lowering quits for both men and women.

An association between oral microbiota and cognitive performance in schizophrenia has been reported by researchers at Science Tokyo. By analyzing saliva samples and cognitive test scores from patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls, the study shows that lower oral microbial diversity is associated with poorer cognitive function, with specific predicted microbial metabolic pathways potentially linked to this relationship. These association patterns offer testable hypotheses for future longitudinal and experimental studies.