When a baby is born, the bones of the skull are meant to behave like the slats of a wooden barrel, flexible enough to slide into the correct orientation as the brain beneath them doubles in size during the first year of life. However, in about seven of every 100,000 births one of those seams between the bones of the skull (called a suture) closes too early along a single side of the forehead, a condition called unicoronal synostosis (or UCS). Instead of rounding out evenly, the skull twists: one brow pulls backward, the opposite brow juts forward, the eye sockets tilt, and the nose shifts off‑centre. Beyond cosmetic considerations such as the visible asymmetry, these children can also face raised brain pressure, vision problems and slower development.

Facial reconstruction is one of the most challenging fields in cosmetic and reconstructive surgery. When patients undergo skin transplants to address large facial defects, the surgeon’s goal is to restore both the function and appearance of the face in a way that integrates seamlessly with their natural features. Dr Xusong Luo, Dr Lin Lu and their colleagues at Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital have developed an innovative approach that offers a promising new option for repairing large facial defects, particularly in children born with giant congenital melanocytic nevi.

Thyroid cancer is one of the more common cancers globally, and for most patients, the prognosis is generally favorable with timely and effective treatment. The usual course involves surgery to remove the thyroid gland, followed by radioactive iodine therapy to eliminate any remaining cancerous cells. However, for a subset of patients, the story is far more complicated. When thyroid cancer no longer responds to radioiodine therapy, a condition known as radioiodine-refractory differentiated thyroid cancer, the outlook becomes significantly more daunting. These patients face limited treatment options and a much grimmer prognosis.

While checklists are often a vital tool for medical procedures, there has so far been little guidance on how they should be designed and applied in real medical scenarios. Now, a team including Dr. Alex Chaparro, a researcher at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, has developed an algorithm which can help medical experts to decide when a checklist is the best-suited tool for the task at hand; and if so, which type of checklist should be applied, based on the user’s technical experience. The approach could ultimately help complex, potentially urgent medical procedures to become safer and more efficient.

Research from Professor Mamta Jain at UT Southwestern Medical Center and her colleagues reveals how electronic alerts, patient navigation, and mailed outreach can significantly increase hepatitis C screening and treatment in traditionally difficult-to-reach populations. Their work demonstrates that while electronic reminders are effective, combining multiple approaches with adequate clinical staffing and resources leads to the greatest improvements in patient care across all stages of the hepatitis C care continuum.

We can imagine our health as a jigsaw, with each individual piece representing a different aspect of our medical history. These pieces might include blood test results, X-ray images or the notes taken by a doctor as we describe our symptoms. These jigsaw pieces are ultimately recorded and stored in electronic health records (or EHRs). EHRs are a valuable resource, providing an overview of someone’s health and they could have the potential to allow clinicians and researchers to unlock new medical insights. However, there’s a fly in the ointment – not all the pieces in such records always fit together correctly, and they may not completely capture the required information. Some clinical event documentation may not be complete, others do not align with related pieces, and some events are even missing entirely. This data quality problem was tackled by Dr. Hanieh Razzaghi of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and her colleagues, in their innovative work on the PRESERVE study, a research project exploring chronic kidney disease in children (the PRESERVE study itself was led by Drs. Michelle Denburg and Christopher Forrest). Using EHRs from 15 different hospitals across the United States, the team aimed to understand how various treatments could potentially slow down chronic kidney disease progression. However, initially, they had to make sure that the data they were relying on were accurate, reliable, and suitable for the required complex analyses.

Associate Professor Yassir Mahgoub and his team at Penn State University have uncovered an important link between melancholia – a severe form of depression that often doesn’t respond to treatment – and catatonia – a condition characterized by abnormal movements and associated with schizophrenia. The researchers analyzed case studies involving six patients who had been hospitalized for severe depression. All six patients experienced significant relief from their depressive symptoms by taking lorazepam – a drug typically used to treat catatonia. This discovery reveals a potential new avenue for treating severe, treatment-resistant depression.