by Mihai Radu Ionescu & Charlotte Dumas
Each month the eanNews editorial team reviews the scientific press for recently published papers of outstanding interest to neurologists. Below we present our selection for November 2026.
For our Paper of the Month, go here: Paper of the Month Archives – eanNews
Hearing Intervention for Older Adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment. The CHOICE Randomized Clinical Trial
This multicentre, parallel-group, open-label randomised clinical trial evaluated whether hearing intervention could reduce the incidence of dementia-level impairment in older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and coexisting hearing loss. A total of 703 participants aged 60 or older, with coexisting MCI (Clinical Dementia Rating [CDR] global score of 0.5) and moderate to severe hearing loss were enrolled and randomised. Participants were randomised 1:1 to receive either hearing aid intervention or hearing care education. The primary outcome was the conversion rate from MCI to dementia-level impairment over 24 months, defined as a CDR global score 1 or more.
Among 703 randomised patients, 610 completed the trial. No statistically significant difference was observed in the primary outcome: the conversion rate from MCI to dementia-level impairment was 3.09% in the intervention group vs 4.74% in the control group (RR 0.59; 95% CI, 0.25-1.38, p=.23). Prespecified secondary analysis demonstrated that hearing intervention increased the rate of cognitive improvement (15.34% vs 2.36% RR 5.94; 95% 2.46-14.37). No study related adverse events were reported.
In this study, hearing aid intervention did not significantly reduce the incidence of dementia-level impairment at 24 months among older adults with mild cognitive impairment and coexisting hearing loss, although it was associated with a higher rate of cognitive improvement in a prespecified secondary analysis.
Read the paper here: Hearing Intervention for Older Adults With Mild Cognitive Impairment: The CHOICE Randomized Clinical Trial | Trials | JAMA Neurology | JAMA Network
Plasma %p-tau217 varies across racial and ethnic groups in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease screening
Plasma %p-tau217, the ratio of phosphorylated to non-phosphorylated tau217, is increasingly used to limit amyloid PET scans in preclinical Alzheimer’s disease (AD) trials, but its distribution across racial and ethnic groups is unclear.
Molina-Henry and colleagues analysed 15,612 cognitively unimpaired adults aged 55–80 screened for the AHEAD 3-45 trials at 106 sites in four world regions (85.3% in North America).
%p-tau217 was lower in Asian, Black and Hispanic participants than in White and non-Hispanic participants. APOE ε4 carriage was associated with higher %p-tau217 in all groups, but this effect was attenuated in Asian, Black and Hispanic participants, and group differences persisted after adjustment for ε4 status. Higher %p-tau217 was associated with lower PACC5 scores and higher amyloid PET Centiloid values in every group. The PET association was broadly consistent across racial groups, supporting plasma pre-screening followed by PET confirmation, although ethnicity-related differences in these associations were exploratory.
The authors suggest that group-level differences in plasma distributions should be considered when designing screening strategies. Limitations include the cross-sectional design, a trial-interested volunteer population and small subgroups in the cognitive and PET analyses.
Read the paper here: Plasma Phosphorylated Tau 217 Percentage by Race and Ethnicity in Preclinical Alzheimer Disease | Dementia and Cognitive Impairment | JAMA Neurology | JAMA Network
A conversational AI app lets people with epilepsy interact with their EEG data in real time
About one-third of people with epilepsy continue to have seizures despite medication, and current EEG-based devices cannot share what they detect with patients in real time.
American researchers linked scalp or intracranial EEG to a secure cloud pipeline and an LLM-based smartphone assistant (GPT-4o-mini). The assistant sends alerts and surveys, answers questions about patients’ own seizure, sleep and spike data, and records their responses to seizure detections as labels to retrain the detector. In 13 patients undergoing video-EEG monitoring, the system exchanged 1,307 messages, with a mean System Usability Scale score of 83/100 (n = 5). In a pseudoprospective simulation, fine-tuning every three hours from patient annotations alone reduced false alarms by about 80% and raised the F1 score, without clinician input, although sensitivity did not improve. This is a small, single-centre inpatient proof of concept, and outpatient studies are planned.
Read the paper here: Human–artificial intelligence collaboration for comanaging epilepsy in real time | Nature Medicine
