However, urgency alone doesn’t advance clinical development. In major markets like the U.S. and Europe, even a brilliant scientific discovery can spend years trapped in the bureaucratic pipeline between university laboratories and hospital trials, only to be delayed further by regulatory and payer hurdles.

Whenever we host global healthcare leaders in Israel, the first thing they notice isn’t just the entrepreneurial energy. It’s the intentional healthcare ecosystem. Supported by universal, HMO-based coverage, the country functions less like a fragmented market and more like a high-density national testbed for innovative output. It is a deliberate design that offers valuable lessons to the broader global market.

The Power of Proximity and Data

In Israel, the core assets are talent, geographical proximity, and integrated infrastructure. Because of the country’s tight geography, world-class research universities, major tertiary medical centers, and dozens of health-tech startups are often just a short drive or train ride away. World-renowned centers such as the Weizmann Institute of Science, Tel Aviv Medical Center and Technion – Israel Institute of Technology even share their campuses with accelerators, incubators, start-ups and VCs.

However, physical proximity is not enough without data, and lots of it. Israel backs this need with nearly 100% digitized, longitudinal electronic health records (EHR) spanning almost three decades. This data is consolidated across four major health plans and represents a diverse population from around the globe.

What does this translate to in practice? Speed and validation. A neuroscientist can walk across the street to validate a concept with a clinician over coffee, secure risk-mitigating early funding from the Israel Innovation Authority and test the concept against real-world health data, all while larger enterprises are still scheduling preliminary committee meetings that can take weeks or months to finalize.

With a population of just under 10 million, Israel isn’t meant to be the end market for breakthrough medical innovation. Instead, it serves as an agile proving ground, the ultimate real-world pressure test for clinically viable solutions before they scale globally.

Bridging the “Valley of Death” in Science

At FINN Partners, we work directly alongside these innovators as their ideas journey from lab to market, counseling global leaders seeking to tap into this supply chain of innovation.

One of the most important lessons we see? Science without an execution pathway wanders. However, purpose-built ecosystems create a fast track from idea to reality.

Look at Corundum Neuroscience, a venture builder created to translate early-stage neuroscience into market-ready digital therapeutics and medical devices. Driven by the reality that lab research is worthless if it never reaches a patient, Corundum acts as an engine turning raw science into scalable products.

Turning Local Need into Global “Traumatech”

The Israeli mindset is built on adapting under pressure, taking an immediate, acute problem and solving it smartly and fast.

We see this clearly in the rapid rise of “Traumatech” and neurotechnology. Driven by an acute localized need to treat trauma and PTSD, Israeli innovators have developed technologies with profound global applications.

We see this in practice with pioneering platforms like GrayMatters Health, which has developed an FDA-cleared digital therapeutic using advanced EEG-neurofeedback to help patients self-regulate the brain activity tied to trauma. Similarly, BrainsWay pioneered Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (Deep TMS) to non-invasively treat severe depression and OCD.

These technologies are already in the field. They are clinically validated, regulatory-reviewed, and scalable tools built under time pressure to treat pressing human suffering not in the distant future, but now.

This drive to take local breakthroughs and scale them globally is taking hold across brain health. Major gatherings like the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference (AAIC) and the AD/PD™ Conference highlight the vital work being done in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and related neurodegenerative conditions, elevating these solutions on the world stage.

The Bottom Line: Innovation Demands an Ecosystem

Tackling the global brain health crisis takes more than capital or exceptional science in isolation.

Success requires a working environment that dismantles silos among academia, clinical practice, government, and private capital. Israel didn’t build this incubator as an academic exercise. It built it through collaboration because it was essential to meet people’s health urgencies. The need was evident, the solution essential, and so the nation stripped away friction points that create unnecessary obstacles to validation and access.

For global pharma leaders, health systems, and investors, early partnership with a high-density innovation culture like Israel provides a high-speed engine for validating and de-risking brain health innovations.

Brain health cannot remain an isolated research priority or an afterthought within the broader health agenda. It demands a connected, cross-sector mission uniting science, technology, investment, policy and patient care. Israel has built an innovation infrastructure that offers a powerful model for global health.

Our goal now must be to build the communications bridges that connect these innovators and innovation hubs to global markets, ensuring brain health breakthroughs move smoothly through complex health systems into the hands of the patients whose lives they can change.

Ellie Hanson is a Senior Partner and Co-Lead of FINN Partners Israel. She specializes in cross-border communications, helping Israeli innovators scale effectively into global markets.

The post Israel: A Global Incubator for Brain Health Innovation appeared first on Medika Life.

Instead, she told people she still had “so many things” she wanted to achieve. Four days later, she was dead.

I know this differently than most people do, because I am a radiation oncologist. For 36 years, I have sat across from people with cancer while they talked about what came next. Sometimes that meant radiation or chemotherapy. Just as often, it meant a daughter’s wedding, a trip already booked, a grandchild arriving in December or whether they would be strong enough to get back into the garden in spring. I have heard each of these in the last month.

When I was younger, I assumed serious illness would change the way people thought about time. I imagined that once the stakes became high enough, the future would begin to recede and the present would take over. That isn’t what I have seen. People can understand that they are seriously ill and still make plans. They can discuss a frightening scan and then ask whether treatment will interfere with a vacation. They can know that a cancer is incurable and still wonder what they should buy their spouse for Christmas.

This isn’t necessarily denial. It is what happens when illness enters a life that is already in progress. The dog still needs walking. Someone needs groceries. The mortgage is due. There is a birthday next month and a friend coming for dinner on Saturday. Even when the medical facts have changed dramatically, much of Tuesday can still look like Tuesday.

On August 21, Parton spoke publicly about going through a difficult period with her health. That same day, she was admitted to Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. She died there four days later. Her representatives said that she had been diagnosed with cancer and described her illness as a brief battle. They have not disclosed what type of cancer she had.

Now that we know the ending, everything before it looks different.

The canceled performance becomes a warning. The missed appearance becomes evidence. A doctor’s instruction not to travel takes on a significance it may not have carried when it was given. Separate events become a sequence, and the sequence begins to look as though it had been pointing toward the same destination all along.

I have watched families do this for years. They ask when things really changed. Was it when she stopped eating as much? Was it the weekend when he didn’t want to leave the house? Should we have understood what the fatigue meant? Was there a moment when everyone should have known?

Sometimes there is an answer. Often there isn’t, because illness is much easier to understand backward than forward. What Parton said four days before her death gives us a glimpse of where her attention still was. She was thinking about what came next.

The medical record looks orderly. Life isn’t.

When I began practicing oncology, I thought of serious illness as a series of recognizable thresholds. Diagnosis. Treatment. Response. Progression. Eventually, for some patients, the point when treatment could no longer do enough.

The medical record encourages that way of thinking. It puts dates beside events and turns a complicated human experience into a chronology that can fit on a screen. Living through illness is different. A scan can worsen while someone continues going to work. A person can receive radiation in the morning and pick up a grandchild from school that afternoon. Someone can understand perfectly well that a cancer is incurable and still make a restaurant reservation six months away. There is rarely a bell that rings when ordinary life becomes something else.

I had a patient once, a woman in her mid-sixties, who came to me complaining that she could no longer walk to the grocery store the way she used to. She had been going there three times a week — a routine that anchored her mornings. Now she was tired halfway there. She asked if radiation therapy would help her get back to it.

I told her the truth: probably not. She nodded, and we talked about treatment options. Six months later, during a follow-up visit, I asked how she was managing. “Oh, fine,” she said. “I order online now.” She had adjusted so completely that she’d already forgotten the walk was ever part of her life at all.

Over the years, I have become increasingly interested in this kind of adaptation. Someone starts taking the elevator instead of the stairs. The afternoon nap becomes necessary rather than optional. A person who always cooked begins ordering food. The weekend that once restored them no longer does. None of these changes feel important enough to mark on a calendar. We simply adjust around them.

What interests me is how long we can do this without realizing how much our world has changed. Life still works, so we assume our capacity hasn’t changed very much. Often it has. We have simply become good at spending less of it.

That observation extends far beyond cancer, which is why I built the Capacity Checkup — a tool that looks at sleep, mood, focus and body to help you see where your reserves may be thinning. Take the free 3-minute Capacity Checkup and see where it makes sense to pay attention first.

There was nothing left for Dolly Parton to prove

She had sold more than 100 million records. Her songs became part of American culture. Her Imagination Library, started in Tennessee, grew into an international program that has put hundreds of millions of books into children’s hands. During the pandemic, she donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center to support research on the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. What interests me is that apparently she wasn’t keeping score. She still had things she wanted to do.

After decades of treating older adults, I have become interested in people who keep something ahead of them — people who don’t think they’re finished. It doesn’t have to be important to anyone else. A trip works. So does a garden, learning a piece of music, seeing a grandchild graduate, finishing a book or getting strong enough to walk somewhere you haven’t been able to walk for a while. The project matters less than the fact that there is still a project. Perhaps that is why Parton’s comment from four days ago caught me more than the lists of awards and accomplishments. She wasn’t describing a completed life. She was describing the next part of it.

Maybe there is something good about leaving things unfinished. Death encourages the people who remain to turn a life into a finished story. I have watched people lose futures they desperately wanted, and there is nothing reassuring about that. But 36 years in oncology have made me see another side of it. Maybe feeling unfinished isn’t evidence that we failed to complete our lives. Maybe it is what being alive feels like.

As long as we are engaged with the world, there is another thing we want to see, make, repair, learn or give to someone else. We keep placing small bets on a future we cannot actually guarantee.

Most mornings, none of us thinks much about that. We make the reservation anyway. We buy the concert tickets. We plant something that won’t bloom for months. We tell someone we’ll see them at Christmas. We begin books we may take years to finish.

Dolly Parton had been doing some version of that for eight decades. She had gone from a one-room cabin in Tennessee to a career almost impossible to summarize. She had written thousands of songs, built companies, made an enormous amount of money and given a great deal of it away. Four days before she died, she was still talking about the things she hoped to accomplish.

After 36 years of watching people live alongside serious illness, I don’t hear that as a story about someone who failed to understand that time was running out. I hear something much more familiar. She still thought there would be a tomorrow. So do we. And most days, that is how we manage to live.

The post Four Days Before Dolly Parton Died, She Was Talking About the Future appeared first on Medika Life.

Then eggs were declared acceptable again. Butter quietly returned to many breakfast tables. Researchers questioned whether whole milk was really worse than skim milk. Even the evidence surrounding red meat proved to be less certain than many people had assumed.

No wonder people throw up their hands and ask, “How can the experts keep changing their minds?”

The answer is actually reassuring. Science is supposed to change.

Yesterday’s certainty

When I was growing up, breakfast meant bacon, eggs, buttered toast, and a glass of whole milk. Few people questioned whether those foods were healthy.

Beginning in the 1960s, however, nutrition advice shifted dramatically. Saturated fat became the villain. We were encouraged to choose skim milk instead of whole milk, margarine instead of butter, and carbohydrates instead of fats. Red meat became something to limit. Eggs were viewed with suspicion. Millions of us faithfully changed our eating habits because we believed the science was settled. But science is rarely settled.

Looking more closely at the evidence

Over the past decade, researchers have reexamined many of the studies that shaped dietary recommendations. Several respected investigators concluded that the evidence supporting three daily servings of low-fat dairy was much weaker than most people realized. Likewise, convincing evidence that whole milk increases the risk of heart disease compared with reduced-fat milk has been difficult to demonstrate.

Researchers also questioned the assumption that whole-fat dairy inevitably promotes obesity. Some studies found just the opposite: because full-fat dairy is more satisfying, people may actually consume fewer total calories during the day.

And eggs got a reprieve on life a few years ago.

Red meat has generated similar debate. Several comprehensive reviews concluded that the evidence linking moderate red meat consumption with heart disease, cancer, or early death was less convincing than previously believed. These conclusions generated enormous controversy — not because researchers recommended eating more meat, but because they emphasized how uncertain the evidence actually was.

That distinction matters.

Nutrition studies are notoriously difficult to perform. Most rely on observing what people choose to eat over many years rather than randomly assigning thousands of people to follow a single diet for decades. Such observational studies can identify associations but cannot prove cause and effect.

That is why nutrition recommendations often evolve as new evidence accumulates.

What we know with greater confidence

Although individual foods continue to be debated, the overall picture has become much clearer. The healthiest diets around the world have remarkably similar characteristics. They emphasize vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, whole grains, and healthy oils. They include adequate protein from meat, fish, or high-proteinvegetables.

They minimize highly processed foods loaded with refined starches, added sugars, and excess sodium, what we now lump together as ultraprocessed foods. They avoid excessive calories.

Whether someone includes modest amounts of dairy or red meat appears to be far less important than the overall quality of the diet.

In other words, arguing over whole milk versus skim milk while drinking sugar-sweetened beverages and eating highly processed snack foods misses the bigger picture.

The real dietary villain

Perhaps the greatest nutritional lesson of the past several decades is that our attention was often directed toward the wrong target. We became preoccupied with individual nutrients — fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates — while the food environment around us changed dramatically.

Today’s supermarkets are filled with ultra-processed foods specifically engineered to be inexpensive, convenient, and difficult to resist. These products often contain combinations of refined flour, sugars, unhealthy fats, salt, and additives that encourage overeating. And they are cheaper relative to whole foods on a calorie for calorie basis, making them the choice of those with limited funds.

Meanwhile, consumption of vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and other minimally processed foods remains lower than recommended for most Americans.

That imbalance likely contributes far more to obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease than whether someone occasionally enjoys a steak or drinks whole milk.

Humility is part of good science

One lesson extends beyond nutrition. Medicine constantly evolves. Here is a good example.

For many years physicians believed stomach ulcers resulted primarily from stress and excess stomach acid. Then two Australian physicians demonstrated that most ulcers were actually caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. Their discovery transformed treatment and eventually earned them the Nobel Prize.

Progress occurred not because science failed, but because science corrected itself. Nutrition science works the same way. As better studies become available, recommendations should change. That is a strength, not a weakness.

So, what should we eat?

Fortunately, the answer is much simpler than many headlines suggest. Eat mostly real food. Fill your plate with vegetables and fruit. Choose beans, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and healthy oils, and first cold pressed extra virgin olive oil. Include fin fish often. If you enjoy dairy, modest amounts are fine, especially live culture unsweetened Greek yogurt. Eggs are healthy and poultry is a good protein source. If you enjoy red meat, have it occasionally rather than making it the centerpiece of every meal. The Mediterranean diet is essentially these choices.

Limit processed meats. Most importantly, avoid making ultra-processed foods the foundation of your diet.

Michael Pollan in his book In Defense of Food, summarized this approach beautifully: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” That advice has aged remarkably well.

Another way to look at it

Instead of looking at one diet or another, a Harvard study published in 2025 analyzed what people actually ate in data from 30 years of the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Followup Study. They asked the question: what did the people who lived to age 70 and were healthy in body and mind eat? Less than ten per cent of the 105,015 participants were alive and met that criterion at age 70. Here is what they ate during midlife. It turns out that they were eating mostly real foods with an emphasis on fruit, whole grains, vegetables with special attention to green leafies, more unsaturated than saturated fats, beans, soy products, yogurt, low-fat dairy, and berries. They tended to avoid trans-fats, processed meats, high-sodium foods, and sugary drinks. Sound familiar?

The authors concluded,“Our findings suggest that dietary patterns rich in plant-based foods, with moderate inclusion of healthy animal-based foods, may enhance overall healthy aging, guiding future dietary guidelines.

The bottom line

Nutrition headlines will continue to change. Future studies will challenge old assumptions, and some recommendations will inevitably be revised. But the fundamentals have remained surprisingly consistent.

The healthiest diet is not built around eliminating one food or glorifying another. It is built around balance, moderation, and eating foods as close as possible to how nature produced them. To carry it a bit further, “Don’t eat anything your grandmother would not recognize.”

Healthy aging is not built on finding the perfect food. It is built on consistently choosing better foods, staying physically active, maintaining a healthy weight, and letting good habits — not dietary fads — shape your future. This is what will assure you of many healthy years, a longer healthspan, not just lifespan.

Perhaps the greatest lesson is not that everything we once believed was wrong. It is that science is always learning — and so should we.

The post Nutrition Advice Keeps Changing — And What Never Changes appeared first on Medika Life.

Billions of your cells will die today. You will probably notice none of them. That may be one of the more remarkable facts about being alive.

Cell death sounds catastrophic because we tend to encounter the word in catastrophic settings. A heart attack kills heart muscle. A stroke kills neurons. Cancer treatment kills tumor cells. But most cell death is nothing like this. It is planned, orderly, and so routine that your tissues depend on it.

Cells age. They become damaged. They finish the jobs they were built to do. Then many activate a carefully controlled program called apoptosis and dismantle themselves. The remarkable part is what happens next. Your body does not simply leave the remains where they fall. It eats them.

Death Without an Alarm

For much of my career in oncology, I have thought about cell death as an objective. Radiation damages cancer cells precisely because we want those cells to stop surviving and reproducing. But killing a cell is only part of the biological story. Someone has to deal with what remains.

This is harder than it sounds. A dying cell contains proteins, DNA, enzymes, membranes, and other material that should not simply spill into the surrounding tissue. If enough intracellular debris escapes uncontrolled, the immune system can interpret the scene as damage and respond with inflammation.

Apoptosis solves part of that problem by allowing a cell to die relatively neatly. The cell shrinks, reorganizes its contents, and packages material rather than simply bursting apart. Then another system takes over. Its name is efferocytosis, from a Latin root meaning to carry to the grave. It is the process by which macrophages and other cells recognize, engulf, and dispose of dying cells. Researchers increasingly view it not merely as garbage collection but as an active part of resolving inflammation and maintaining tissue homeostasis.

The distinction matters. Your immune system does not merely need to know when to attack. It also needs to know when to stop.

The Dead Cell Sends a Message

A cell preparing to disappear does something surprisingly social. It communicates. Dying cells can release molecular signals that attract scavenging cells toward them. Once a macrophage arrives, changes on the dying cell’s surface help identify it as something that should be removed rather than attacked.

One of the best-known changes involves phosphatidylserine, a lipid normally kept largely on the inner side of the cell membrane. During apoptosis, it becomes exposed on the outer surface. In biological terms, it functions something like a flag: I am finished. Remove me.

A macrophage recognizes these signals, surrounds the dying cell, and swallows it. But this is where the story becomes much more interesting than waste disposal. The act of consuming a dying cell can change the macrophage itself. Its metabolism and signaling shift. Rather than simply eliminating debris, the macrophage can move toward programs associated with resolving inflammation and repairing tissue. Recent work continues to reveal how deeply this cleanup process is intertwined with macrophage metabolism.

The janitor does not merely clean the room. Cleaning changes the janitor.

What Happens When Cleanup Slows

This system is extraordinarily efficient, which is why most of us have never heard of it. We tend to notice biological systems only when they fail.

When apoptotic cells are not removed promptly, their orderly death can become less orderly. Membranes eventually lose integrity. Material that had been contained can escape. Signals that should have ended quietly can become inflammatory. That possibility has made efferocytosis increasingly interesting to researchers studying chronic inflammatory disease.

A 2025 review focused specifically on aging described evidence that the machinery of efferocytosis changes as phagocytic cells age and that impaired clearance interacts with several hallmarks of aging, including mitochondrial dysfunction, cellular senescence, altered communication between cells, and chronic inflammation. That does not mean defective efferocytosis is the cause of aging. Biology almost never gives us explanations that convenient. It means something subtler: one reason inflammation may become harder to resolve with age could involve not only how vigorously the immune system responds to damage, but how efficiently it cleans up afterward.

And that changes the question. Instead of asking only why inflammation starts, researchers can also ask why it sometimes fails to end.

Scientists Are Finding the Cleanup System Everywhere

Over the past year, that question has produced some striking results. In 2025, researchers studying newborn and adult hearts found that macrophages in newborn tissue were particularly equipped for efferocytosis after injury. Engulfing dying cells altered macrophage metabolism in ways that helped promote tissue regeneration. Adult tissues did not reproduce the same response as effectively.

Other researchers have found connections in very different tissues. A 2025 Nature study showed that limited death of pancreatic beta cells could remodel macrophages in the pancreatic islets through efferocytosis. In osteoarthritis models, investigators reported that high glucose could impair macrophage efferocytosis through a specific molecular mechanism and worsen disease progression. In 2026, researchers reported that macrophage efferocytosis can promote inflammation resolution and accelerate wound healing. Another study found that efferocytosis enhanced macrophage functions involved in blood-vessel formation during bone-marrow regeneration.

But perhaps the most striking recent finding came in 2026. Researchers found that restoring the ability of tissue-resident macrophages to clear senescent neutrophils improved multiple signs of aging in mice, including frailty, muscle loss, cognitive decline, cardiac dysfunction, and systemic inflammation. The mechanism involved blocking a specific inflammatory signaling pathway in aging macrophages. The researchers also found evidence of related changes in aged human tissues, although whether the same intervention could restore clearance in people remains unknown. Still, the finding raises a provocative possibility: at least some of the decline in this hidden cleanup system may be reversible rather than inevitable.

Different organs. Different diseases. Different experimental systems. The recurring idea is that disposing of a dead cell is not necessarily the end of a biological event. Sometimes it helps determine what happens next.

The Part of Healing We Rarely Think About

Medicine naturally focuses on threats. Kill the bacterium. Remove the tumor. Suppress the inflammation. Repair the injury. Those verbs make sense because disease announces itself through disruption.

But healthy physiology depends just as much on what happens after disruption. A fever must come down. An immune response must retreat. Damaged material must be removed. Tissue must reorganize itself. Cells recruited for an emergency cannot remain indefinitely in emergency mode. Healing therefore requires something that fighting does not: an ending.

Efferocytosis is one of the mechanisms that helps create that ending. I find that idea increasingly compelling because it changes how we think about biological resilience. Health is not simply the ability to resist damage. No organism can do that indefinitely. Cells will die. DNA will be injured. Proteins will misfold. Infections will occur. Tissues will be stressed. The question is what happens afterward.

Your Body Is Not a Static Thing

We often imagine ourselves as collections of permanent structures. My heart. My skin. My lungs. My brain. But the apparent stability of a body conceals astonishing turnover. Cells disappear and are replaced. Molecules are dismantled and rebuilt. Immune cells patrol tissues, respond to disturbances, and then change state again. The continuity we experience is constructed from constant replacement.

Perhaps that is why the biology of cleanup has been relatively easy to overlook. Successful removal leaves almost nothing to see. There is no scar, no fever, no dramatic symptom announcing that a macrophage has just engulfed a cell that no longer belongs. The evidence of success is absence. No inflammation. No accumulation. No alarm. Just tissue continuing to function as though nothing happened.

Researchers are now investigating whether manipulating efferocytosis might eventually help treat inflammatory and age-related diseases. That possibility is intriguing, but much of this work remains mechanistic or preclinical. We are considerably better at describing the cleanup machinery than at safely turning it into therapies. For now, the more interesting lesson may be the simpler one.

Every day, enormous numbers of cells reach the end of their lives inside us. Most disappear without ceremony because another cell recognizes what has happened, carries away the remains, and helps restore quiet. With age, that clearance can become less efficient. The reasons appear to involve changes in the macrophages themselves as well as the inflammatory and metabolic environments in which they work. The biology is still being unraveled, but the larger principle is already striking: resilience depends not only on responding to damage, but on resolving it.

We spend a great deal of time thinking about how the body fights. Some of its most impressive work begins when the fighting is over.

If you enjoy exploring the hidden biology behind how we age, recover, and maintain our capacity, I explore one question like this each week in The Capacity Report. You can join me here.

The post Your Body Is Quietly Eating Its Dead Cells appeared first on Medika Life.

There is a lot of noise out there about how to take care of our brain. Trying to distinguish between an array of unverified products and wellness hacks – the “lotions and potions” of brain health – can feel like a thankless task.

In the midst of historic momentum with the research pipeline for new therapeutics and diagnostics for Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, it’s important for people to know what they can do in the decades before cognitive decline may emerge. Increasingly, neuroscientists are making the case for actionable, evidence-based lifestyle interventions.

To better understand how everyday choices, nutrition, and environmental factors influence cognitive longevity, I recently spoke with Dr. Ramon Velazquez, an associate professor at Arizona State University and an Advisory Board Member at Performance Lab. Here are some key takeaways from that dynamic conversation.

Lifestyle factors belong in the spotlight

While much of the medical community remains focused on pharmaceutical treatments for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease, lifestyle interventions offer immense, underutilized potential for preserving cognitive health. Physical exercise, strong social ties, and continuous cognitive engagement actively stimulate brain cells, building what Dr. Velazquez and other neuroscientists call “cognitive resilience.”

The challenge is delivering effective messaging that resonates with people and offers manageable steps they can take regularly. Dr. Velazquez noted that shifting the public narrative requires making brain science relatable rather than overwhelming. “You get a lot of stuff that goes into the media that’s really high level that people just don’t understand. So we need to bring it to a level where people can absorb it,” he said.

By breaking down complex neuroscience into accessible concepts, individuals can better recognize how routine activities protect neurons against age-related decline. This is especially important in helping people overcome “omission bias” — ignoring preventative care simply because symptoms are not immediately visible. Pathological changes in the brain can begin up to 40 years before clinical symptoms manifest, making early adoption of healthy habits essential.

Addressing the misconception that preventative steps are not necessary unless immediate dramatic results are felt is one of the most important imperatives that neuroscientists and primary care physicians should be tackling today.

Feed your brain: the role of choline and inflammation

Diet plays an equally vital role in shielding the brain from cognitive decline and neuroinflammation, which underlies virtually all neurodegenerative disorders. Managing inflammation, particularly in our younger and middle years, could deliver profound changes in brain health outcomes later in life.

Dr. Velazquez highlighted essential nutrients that remain widely under-consumed, particularly choline. As a B-vitamin-like nutrient, choline serves as a building block for cell membranes and for acetylcholine, a crucial neurotransmitter involved in learning and memory. “What we found is that if you look at individuals who are at risk of disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and also just mild cognitive impairment, they typically consume less dietary choline and also exhibit lower levels of circulating blood levels of choline,” he said.  This is concerning, as a large portion of the population is unaware that choline is a necessary nutrient that must be consumed daily for vital bodily and brain functions.

Before rushing out to stock up on choline supplements, however, consider where this important nutrient naturally occurs. The very foundation of the Mediterranean diet, which is linked to longevity and healthy aging, is rich in choline sources, including egg yolks, poultry, salmon, leafy greens, and beans. The National Institutes of Health has some great information here on including choline in our diets.

Fostering Community-Driven Brain Health

Individual efforts are far more effective when supported by an engaging environment. Dr. Velazquez stresses the necessity of community engagement, family buy-in, and relatable role models to sustain long-term lifestyle changes and brain health.

Communicating research directly to the public remains at the core of his mission. “I enjoy giving scientific talks to scientists, but I enjoy giving talks related to health and disease to the community much more. Because I feel like that is what our job is. We’re funded by taxpayer dollars, and we should be giving back to the community,” he said.

Through accessible science education, dietary optimization, and active community outreach, bridging the gap between the latest neurological research and everyday habits offers the clearest path toward lifelong cognitive vitality.

The post Playing the Long Game appeared first on Medika Life.

The knowledge is vast. What gets done with it is piecemeal.

Instead of one effort, the field is carved into territories. Alzheimer’s here, mental health there, stroke and epilepsy each with their own specialists and their own charities, each drawing on a separate stream of research funding, rarely meeting across the lines that divide them. The brain is treated as a collection of distinct diseases rather than one organ under many kinds of pressure.

One Brain, Many Silos

Why does the largest health burden in the world still get tackled in pieces? Part of the answer is structural. Each field is competent on its own terms. Each also competes for research funding, policy attention, and a share of a health budget that is never big enough.

And the splintering runs counter to the shape of the problem. The conditions that get studied separately share risk factors and underlying biology. The same Lancet Neurology analysis links air pollution to stroke risk and lead exposure to a large share of the global burden of intellectual disability.

The people best placed to act do not think in therapeutic areas at all. A finance ministry thinks in terms of productivity and dependency ratios. An education system thinks in cognitive development. An employer thinks in workforce capacity. Approach each of them through a single disease, and they see a fragment. Show them the whole, and the case becomes theirs.

The Climate Is a Brain Health Problem Too

The adjacencies are where the fragmentation becomes expensive. Take climate. A 2024 review led by Professor Sanjay Sisodiya at UCL found that higher temperatures and sharper swings in temperature raise hospital admissions for dementia, worsen seizure control in epilepsy, aggravate multiple sclerosis, and increase both the incidence of stroke and the deaths that follow it. 

During the 2003 European heatwave, around a fifth of the excess deaths were among people with neurological conditions. Sisodiya did not hedge: there is, he said, “clear evidence for an impact of the climate on some brain conditions”. The mechanisms are not all settled, and correlation and causation remain tangled in places. But climate is, among other things, a brain health problem. It is rarely treated as one.

Take the arts. The largest evidence review to date, a 2019 WHO scoping review drawing on more than 900 publications, found a real role for the arts in preventing ill health and in managing conditions from dementia to depression. Art therapy belongs in the picture of brain health. It reaches the same organ from a direction that clinical medicine rarely looks in.

This is the big-tent moment the field keeps failing to seize.

Climate, education, the arts, sport, the workplace: each shapes the brain, and each sits in a different silo of research, funding and policy. The dots are all on the page. Nobody is joining them.

What Joining the Dots Would Take

So what would joining them actually require? Start with the economics, because that is what moves ministries. The McKinsey Health Institute estimates the brain capital opportunity at up to $11.7 trillion in global economic value, and the OECD and the Brain Capital Alliance go further, treating brain health and brain skills as economic infrastructure alongside physical and financial capital rather than beneath it. Seen that way, brain health becomes an economic priority, and economic priorities are the ones that reach the treasury.

The policy world has already conceded the point. When all 194 WHO member states adopted the Intersectoral Global Action Plan on epilepsy and other neurological disorders in 2022, the operative word in the title was intersectoral, meaning a response coordinated across sectors rather than passed back and forth like a baton. 

The mandate exists. What is missing is delivery built the same way: research that crosses the lines between diseases, prevention that reaches into the places that shape the brain, from air quality to classrooms to workplaces, and care that treats mental and neurological health as neighbours rather than strangers. None of this is easy. The incentives still reward the silo, and the specialist who owns one corner of the brain is rarely rewarded for looking at the rest.

Science has already stopped drawing hard lines between these things. It treats the brain as one organ, shaped by climate and pollution and education and art, worn down and built back along the same paths. The way the brain is researched, funded, and cared for has not kept pace. Whether it is finally addressed as one problem rather than many is a question the next decade will have to answer.

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Its leaders were visible throughout the convention, participating in discussions on biopharma innovation, precision medicine, artificial intelligence, investment, genomics and policy. Partnership announcements emerged throughout the week. Delegations moved between panel discussions and private meetings with investors, entrepreneurs, researchers, and industry leaders. The message was clear. Abu Dhabi is making a strategic effort to become a notable player in biotechnology and the life sciences.

The timing is not accidental.

Around the world, governments increasingly view biotechnology as a strategic investment industry. Scientific innovation drives economic growth. Advanced therapeutics create new manufacturing opportunities. Genomics and precision medicine are reshaping approaches to disease prevention and treatment. Nations that attract talent, investment and scientific expertise position themselves at the forefront of one of the century’s most consequential industries and life-sustaining movements.

Abu Dhabi is determined to be among those countries.

Building the Innovation Foundation

Substantial investments and partnerships in infrastructure, research, education and health innovation support the Emirate’s ambitions.

In April 2025, Abu Dhabi launched the Health, Endurance, Longevity and Medicine (HELM) Cluster, an initiative designed to establish a globally competitive ecosystem spanning biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical technology, genomics, digital health, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing.

Officials project the initiative will contribute AED 94 billion to the economy by 2045, attract more than AED 42 billion in investment and create approximately 30,000 jobs.

Those figures reflect more than economic development goals. They signal a growing recognition that biotechnology is a cornerstone of future growth and global competitiveness.

The Emirate is not starting from scratch. Organizations including M42, PureHealth, Mubadala Bio, Khalifa University, and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence have established a foundation that combines research, clinical capabilities, advanced analytics and investment resources. The UAE Genome Program has surpassed 900,000 sequenced genomes, making it one of the world’s largest population genomics initiatives and providing a valuable resource for scientific research and precision medicine.

These investments provide the ingredients necessary to compete. Partnerships provide the opportunity to accelerate progress.

Building Through Collaboration

Biotechnology has long been a collaborative enterprise among private equity and entrepreneurs, academic medicine and corporations, and, now, nations working side by side with other countries’ governments.

Scientific discovery depends on the exchange of knowledge among researchers, entrepreneurs, clinicians, manufacturers, regulators, and investors. No single country possesses every advantage. Successful ecosystems learn how to connect their strengths with those of others.

Abu Dhabi’s recent actions suggest its leaders understand this reality more than anyone else. They act on it.

During the BIO International Convention, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi announced a strategic collaboration with Sanofi focused on vaccine development and life sciences innovation. The previous year at BIO in Boston, the Department established a partnership with Boehringer Ingelheim that expanded access to the company’s OpnME research platform, creating new opportunities for translational research and scientific discovery.

An additional 2025 agreement was signed with Abbott, focused on pharmaceutical innovation, manufacturing capabilities, and emerging technologies.

These were not isolated announcements. They represented a broader effort to connect Abu Dhabi with leaders across the global life sciences community. That strategy continued at BIO 2026.

On June 23, 2026, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi announced a strategic partnership with Biocom California, one of the world’s largest life sciences associations representing more than 1,800 biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical technology organizations. The agreement creates a formal gateway between the California innovation ecosystem and Abu Dhabi’s growing life sciences sector, strengthening opportunities for collaboration among researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators across both markets.

The significance of the announcement extends beyond California. It reflects Abu Dhabi’s effort to connect itself to some of the world’s most influential innovation networks and to participate in the exchange of scientific knowledge, talent, and investment that increasingly defines biotechnology leadership.

Moving Up the Biotech Value Chain

If the Biocom agreement demonstrated Abu Dhabi’s commitment to global collaboration, a second announcement made the Emirate’s ambitions even clearer.

On June 24, 2026, the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, M42, and Mammoth Biosciences announced a partnership to advance gene-editing therapies, clinical research, and advanced therapy manufacturing in Abu Dhabi. The agreement seeks to leverage insights generated through the Emirati Genome Program while supporting the development of next-generation treatments for inherited diseases.

This announcement stands out because it moves beyond ecosystem building and into the development of future therapies.

Mammoth Biosciences was co-founded by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Jennifer Doudna, whose pioneering work helped bring CRISPR gene-editing technology into medicine. Under the agreement, Mammoth will contribute its proprietary gene-editing platform, M42 will provide genomics, health, and clinical research infrastructure, and the Department of Health will support the regulatory and research environment needed to advance development.

The collaboration includes plans to introduce Mammoth’s lead clinical candidate, MB-111, into Abu Dhabi’s research ecosystem, support advanced gene-editing clinical trials, establish advanced therapy manufacturing capabilities, and develop local expertise through workforce training programs.

Perhaps most significantly, the partnership highlights how Abu Dhabi is leveraging its genomics investments. The Emirati Genome Program has created one of the world’s most comprehensive population genomics initiatives. The Mammoth agreement represents an effort to translate those insights into therapies targeting inherited diseases.

As H.E. Dr. Noura Al Ghaithi noted when announcing the partnership, Abu Dhabi is focused on translating genomic insights into therapies to address some of the most complex inherited diseases affecting populations in the region and worldwide.

Leadership Matters

The prominence of Abu Dhabi at BIO 2026 reflects sustained engagement from senior leaders. H.E. Dr. Noura Khamis Al Ghaithi, Undersecretary of the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi, and Dr. Mohamed Al Ameri, Division Director of Genome and Biobank at DoH, are among the officials representing the Emirate’s vision throughout the convention.

Their participation reflects a broader commitment. During Abu Dhabi’s 2025 strategic mission to the United States, approximately 40 representatives from 12 organizations attended more than 20 strategic meetings, conducted 16 institutional visits, participated in 9 BIO-related panels, and established 7 new partnerships and agreements.

Such activity underscores an important point. Building a biotechnology ecosystem requires more than investment capital. It requires leadership, patience, and a willingness to build relationships across borders and disciplines.

A Must-Watch Innovation Hub

For decades, discussions about biotechnology leadership have focused on a familiar collection of cities and regions. Boston, San Diego, Basel, London, and Singapore earned their positions through scientific excellence, entrepreneurial activity, and investment.

Abu Dhabi is pursuing a different path.

The Emirate is leveraging capital, scientific infrastructure, genomics, artificial intelligence, policy support, and international partnerships to establish a presence in the global biotechnology landscape. Its strategy recognizes that modern biotechnology advances through collaboration and that scientific leadership increasingly depends upon connecting talent, expertise, and resources across borders.

BIO 2026 demonstrated that Abu Dhabi is no longer simply expressing an ambition to participate in the life sciences sector. Through initiatives such as the HELM Cluster, partnerships with organizations including Sanofi, Boehringer Ingelheim, Abbott, Biocom California, and Mammoth Biosciences, and investments spanning genomics, research, and advanced therapies, the Emirate is laying the foundations for a biotechnology ecosystem with global aspirations.

Whether Abu Dhabi joins the ranks of the world’s leading life sciences hubs remains to be seen – but it should be watched closely. What is increasingly difficult to overlook is the depth of its commitment and the speed with which effort is being translated into action.

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The body remains, but the self doesn’t.

We understand something in those moments that we rarely say plainly. And perhaps, it’s time we put this idea front and center. Cognition isn’t merely something a person has, it’s something a person is.

Day after day, we become ourselves through the act of thinking. From the complex to the trivial, we traverse a reality that bumps and bruises us into personhood. And that friction isn’t an obstacle to identity, it’s how identity forms.

Aristotle understood this long before neuroscience provided a name for it. Character isn’t something we possess. It is something we create. What we think shapes what we do. What we do, repeatedly, shapes who we become. Which is why the question of artificial intelligence, at least to me, isn’t primarily a question about productivity or efficiency.

Of course, AI doesn’t arrive as a threat, it arrives as a relief. And that’s what makes it so insidious. There’s no cognitive check engine light to warn you. There’s just the comfort of a swift and almost effortless answer. The friction that used to shape you simply didn’t happen. Do that enough times and something changes, not dramatically, but in the way that habits shift things. Gradually, then all at once.

Technology has always extended human capability. The wheel extended our legs. Writing extended memory. The calculator extended arithmetic. But AI is different in kind, and not merely degree. It reaches into cognition itself, into the territory where “we” live—into the domain of judgment, understanding, and idenity. A calculator doesn’t threaten to do your becoming for you.

The neuroscientist Michael Merzenich is well-known for the mechanism that we today call neuroplasticity. Simply put, neural connections are strengthen when used and weakened when not. The brain adapts continuously to the demands placed upon it. This isn’t a lofty metaphor but measurable biology. The brain you exercise is not the brain you don’t.

But cognitive surrender isn’t a neutral act. Every decision handed off to AI are small withdrawals from the account of the self. Of course, handing the process over to a machine provides certain efficiency or even relief, but you step away from the mechanism through which you author, well, you.

There is a phrase, adapted from the Upanishads, that I alluded to earlier: as you think, so you act. As you act, so you become. This is doing more than describing habit. It is describing identity formation. We are not simply what we know. We are, in part, what we have struggled to understand.

The answers may still sound like you. What fills the space is not.

That’s the abyss. Not a dramatic fall, but a quiet retreat from the very process that makes a person a person.

I wrote about the Borrowed Mind as a possibility. Now, I think it’s worth asking, with some regularity, whether it has become a habit.

John Nosta is the author of the best seller:  The Borrow Mind—Reclaiming Human Thought in the Age of AI.

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Despite living longer than men, women spend approximately 25 percent more of their lives in poor health, according to research from the World Economic Forum and the McKinsey Health Institute. Across reproduction, brain health, autoimmune conditions, cardiovascular disease, and mental health, the gaps in research, funding, and care are persistent.

That reality provided important context for the launch of The Shift, a new mini documentary series from BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions, unveiled at HLTH Europe. The series explores issues ranging from reproductive health and cardiovascular disease to autoimmune disorders, menopause, mental health and healthy aging. Through storytelling, the documentary project elevates the experiences of women while highlighting the challenges that persist and the opportunities for progress.

The HLTH EU panel discussion was timed for the opening of The Shift and featured Shahnoor Abbas, Senior Series Developer and Research Development Lead for The Shift at BBC StoryWorks Commercial Productions; Elena Bonfiglioli, General Manager, Global Health & Life Sciences at Microsoft, and Priya Agrawal, MD, Vice President, Global Health Equity and Partnerships at MSD. Their conversation, moderated by Jody Tropeano Greene, Head of Content for HLTH, explored why women’s health remains one of the most significant opportunities for innovation, investment and system improvement.

A Conversation Decades in the Making

The panelists approached the topic from different perspectives, yet a common theme emerged. Women’s health has received increasing attention for more than a decade, but many of the barriers women encounter remain rooted in the design of health systems.

For BBC StoryWorks, The Shift represents an effort to sustain attention on issues that too often receive episodic interest. The series combines personal stories with broader insights into the realities women face across different countries, cultures and stages of life.

The BBC initiative and the HLTH EU mainstage conversation arrive at a time when women’s health is attracting growing attention from investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers and health industry leaders. New companies are emerging. New technologies are being developed. More organizations are recognizing both the societal and economic importance of addressing longstanding gaps in care.

The timing of The Shift is notable. Women’s health innovation is receiving growing attention from investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers and health leaders. Industry analysts estimate that approximately $2 billion was invested in venture-backed women’s health companies across the United States and Europe in 2025, reflecting increased interest in addressing challenges that extend beyond reproductive health to include cardiovascular disease, menopause, mental health, oncology and healthy aging.

The trend signals growing recognition that improving women’s health is a societal imperative and a significant economic opportunity. Yet as the discussion at HLTH Europe made clear, investment and innovation alone will not be enough if women continue to face fragmented systems that are difficult to navigate.

When Access Exists but Navigation Fails

Dr. Agrawal, an obstetrician-gynecologist by training, whose work has included clinical practice in the UK NHS, global pharma brand stewardship in emerging middle-income nations, maternal health awareness initiatives, and the creation of sustainable health markets, described a reality familiar to many women. Access to care may exist on paper; however, reaching that care, understanding available options and navigating fragmented systems remains a challenge.

“We’ve built systems like mazes with different entry points, different providers and different messages,” said Dr. Agrawal. “Women are often left navigating all of this themselves at the moments where they are most vulnerable.”

Her observation echoed the comments by fellow panelists, which touched on an issue that extends beyond women’s health. Across many countries, patients frequently encounter disconnected providers, inconsistent communication and care journeys that require them to coordinate appointments, referrals and information on their own. The burden of connecting those pieces often falls on the individual seeking care rather than the system intended to support them.

For women, that complexity can be especially challenging. Responsibilities related to caregiving, work, family and personal health often intersect at the very moment care is needed. Understanding what symptoms are normal, knowing when to seek help, determining where to go and finding trusted sources of information become added obstacles.

That reality led to one of the discussion’s compelling observations. “This is not an access problem. It’s a design problem.”

The distinction matters. Discussions about women’s health often focus on whether services exist. Design asks a different question: can people realistically find, understand and benefit from those services when they need them most?

The Power of Stories to Sustain Change

The panel also explored the role technology may play in addressing those challenges. Rather than adding new layers of complexity, emerging digital tools and artificial intelligence applications are increasingly being developed to simplify navigation, improve continuity and support people between clinical encounters.

“What excites me is that technology is finally starting to reduce friction instead of adding layers of complexity,” Dr. Agrawal observed.

That perspective aligned with comments from Bonfiglioli, whose work at Microsoft focuses on helping health systems leverage data, cloud technologies and artificial intelligence to improve outcomes. Technology, however, was not presented as a solution on its own. The discussion repeatedly returned to the importance of human connection.

Those themes are central to the documentary series itself. BBC StoryWorks has built a reputation for transforming complex issues into compelling narratives that audiences can understand and relate to. Through The Shift, the goal is not merely to document challenges but to foster greater understanding of the experiences women face and the opportunities that exist to improve care.

Abbas emphasized the power of storytelling to connect data and lived experience. Statistics can identify a problem. Research can explain it. Stories help people understand why it matters and why action is necessary.

That may be the enduring value of The Shift. The series does not introduce a new conversation. Instead, it brings fresh perspectives to longstanding challenges. Through stories from around the world, the films remind viewers that behind every statistic is a person navigating the complexities of health and care. By fostering greater understanding and empathy, the series encourages health leaders, innovators and policymakers to view women’s health not as a periodic topic of interest, but as an ongoing priority deserving sustained attention and action.

The women featured throughout the series deserve more. The discussion at HLTH Europe reinforces that improving women’s health is more than developing new technologies and expanding services. It is also about creating systems that are easier to navigate, more responsive to people’s medical priorities and ultimately more human in their design.

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A growing body of research is connecting GLP-1 receptor agonists, the class of drugs behind brand names like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound, to a serious eye condition that can cause permanent vision loss. The condition has a long medical name: non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION. Eye specialists sometimes describe it as a stroke of the optic nerve. And once the damage is done, there is currently no treatment that can undo it.

This article is not written to frighten you or push you off your medication without talking to your physician. Millions of people are benefiting from these drugs every day. But the question health experts are now asking out loud is this: when a rare side effect starts appearing in large numbers of people, does it stay rare?

What Are GLP-1 Drugs and Why Are So Many People Taking Them?

GLP-1 stands for glucagon-like peptide-1. These drugs mimic a hormone your gut naturally releases after eating. They slow digestion, reduce hunger, and help control blood sugar. Originally developed for type 2 diabetes, they became household names when studies showed they could also produce significant weight loss.

The popularity of these drugs has been extraordinary. Roughly 15 million people in the United States are currently taking GLP-1 medications, and that number keeps climbing. Many of these users do not have diabetes at all. They are taking the drug specifically to lose weight, often without a full picture of what the long-term risks might look like.

The Eye Condition No One Was Expecting

NAION occurs when blood flow to the front portion of the optic nerve is cut off or severely reduced. The optic nerve is the cable that carries visual signals from your eye to your brain. When that nerve loses its blood supply, even briefly, it can suffer damage that leads to permanent partial or total vision loss in that eye. Health authorities, including the World Health Organization, confirm that this vision loss is usually permanent.

The condition is not brand new. It was already known to affect adults over 50, people with high blood pressure, and people with diabetes. What caught researchers off guard was a cluster of cases appearing in people who had recently started taking semaglutide-based medications.

The alarm was first raised in 2024, when physicians at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, a Harvard Medical School-affiliated hospital, published findings in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology. Their retrospective study of more than 16,000 neuro-ophthalmic patients found that people with type 2 diabetes or obesity who were taking semaglutide had a significantly higher rate of NAION compared to those taking other medications. Among diabetes patients in the study, semaglutide users showed a hazard ratio of 4.28, meaning the risk of developing NAION was more than four times higher than in comparable patients on other glucose-lowering drugs.

A separate Danish and Norwegian study that same year, drawing on data from more than 424,000 patients with type 2 diabetes, found that once-weekly semaglutide use more than doubled the five-year risk of NAION compared to patients taking other diabetes medications.

A Small Percentage Times Millions of People

Here is where the math matters. NAION is classified as “very rare,” meaning it may affect up to 1 in 10,000 people. The European Medicines Agency, which regulates drugs across 27 countries, formally added this classification in June 2025, recommending that product information for Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus be updated to include NAION as a side effect. The World Health Organization issued its own safety alert shortly after.

But consider what “very rare” actually means when tens of millions of people are taking a drug. If even 1 in 10,000 semaglutide users develops NAION, and 15 million Americans are using GLP-1 medications, that translates to roughly 1,500 potential cases in the United States alone. And that figure is based on the most conservative estimate.

The American Optometric Association’s clinical guidance report put it bluntly: “There is a low risk of serious ocular side effects. But a low risk of a big number is a big risk.”

The University at Buffalo researchers who published a related case series in JAMA Ophthalmology noted something else that raised eyebrows. NAION almost always strikes one eye at a time. But some patients on GLP-1 drugs were presenting with the condition in both eyes simultaneously, which is considered atypical and potentially more alarming.

The Research Is Still Sorting Itself Out

To be fair, the picture is not entirely clear-cut. A large February 2025 retrospective study that pooled data from 37 million diabetes patients across 14 international databases found that semaglutide users showed about 14 to 15 NAION cases per 100,000 patients annually, and when compared to other GLP-1 drugs, the risk was not significantly different. This suggests the vision risk may apply to the entire class of GLP-1 medications, not just semaglutide specifically.

A separate large cohort study published in JAMA Network Open, covering 185,000 individuals on GLP-1 drugs, found a slightly higher risk of developing diabetic retinopathy, but a similar rate of NAION compared to those on other treatments. And two studies presented at the American Academy of Ophthalmology’s 2025 annual meeting offered conflicting signals: one tied GLP-1 drugs to increased NAION risk and diabetic retinopathy risk, while another suggested the drugs might actually protect against dry age-related macular degeneration.

Scientists are careful to note that none of the current evidence proves that GLP-1 drugs cause NAION. What exists is a statistically significant association that has now been observed across multiple studies, multiple countries, and multiple drug databases. That is enough to prompt regulatory bodies to act and researchers to dig deeper.

Who May Be at Highest Risk?

Physicians are paying special attention to patients who already have underlying vascular risk factors. High blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, a history of cardiovascular disease, and a structural eye condition called a small optic disc are all considered risk factors for NAION independent of GLP-1 use. When these pre-existing vulnerabilities are combined with a medication that may affect blood flow to the optic nerve, the potential for harm may be higher.

The symptoms to watch for are specific and sudden: vision loss in one eye that seems to come on without warning, often noticed upon waking. There may be a dark or blurry area in part of your field of vision, or a sense that something has been “wiped away” in one corner of sight. There is typically no pain, which is part of why people sometimes wait before seeking care. Any of these symptoms should be treated as a medical emergency.

Where Things Stand Right Now

As of June 2026, the European Medicines Agency has updated its labeling requirements for semaglutide to include NAION. The World Health Organization has issued a formal safety alert. And a multidistrict litigation involving GLP-1 vision loss lawsuits was consolidated in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in December 2025. Legal analysts report that over 1,800 lawsuits had been filed by mid-2025, with more expected as scientific review continues.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not yet added a NAION warning to American drug labels for semaglutide. Novo Nordisk, which manufactures Ozempic and Wegovy, has not yet updated its U.S. prescribing information to reflect the risk. Public health advocates and some legal experts have called for a black box warning, the FDA’s highest-level alert.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology and the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society have both weighed in, stating that they do not recommend that all semaglutide users stop their medication immediately if they develop NAION, since the benefits of the drug may still outweigh individual risks, depending on the patient’s overall health. But both organizations agree that sudden vision changes of any kind require immediate medical evaluation.

What This Means for You

If you are currently taking a GLP-1 medication for weight loss or diabetes management, here are the most important things to keep in mind.

1. Do not stop your medication without talking to your physician. For many people, the health benefits of these drugs are substantial, and an abrupt stop can create its own risks.
2. Tell your physician if you have existing eye problems, high blood pressure, or a history of cardiovascular disease. These factors may influence how closely you should be monitored.
3. Take sudden vision changes seriously. If you wake up one morning and something looks wrong with one eye, that is not something to wait out. Call your physician or go to an emergency room. Time may matter.
4. Ask questions. Ask your physician whether NAION has been discussed in your care plan. Ask whether your specific risk factors warrant more frequent eye exams. You have the right to that conversation

The Larger Question

GLP-1 medications have been genuinely life-changing for many people. They have helped reduce the burden of obesity, lower cardiovascular risk, and control blood sugar in ways that were difficult to achieve before. None of that is in dispute.

But when a drug reaches the scale of tens of millions of users, even rare side effects become a public health question. A risk that affects fewer than 1 in 10,000 people in a clinical trial still produces thousands of real individuals with real and permanent vision loss when multiplied across the population taking these drugs. Those individuals deserve answers, updated labels, and the chance to make informed decisions before the lights go out.

Research is ongoing. Regulatory conversations are happening. In the meantime, staying informed, staying in communication with your physician, and taking any sudden change in vision seriously are the most important steps you can take.

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