Each year in the U.S., bipolar disorder affects about six million adults, and about 16 million adults experience at least one major depressive episode,  according to the National Institute of Mental Health. This study is the largest to date that examined motor-activity patterns in people who represent the full range of mood-disorder subgroups--(Bipolar I (BPI), Bipolar II (BPII) and major depression (MDD)--in a non-clinical population sample. Its findings are thus are more likely to apply to the general community and to offer usable clues about biomarkers for mood disorders.

Can loss-of-function genetic mutations—"human knockouts" that can disrupt both copies of a given gene—give us valuable information about the basic biology and possible therapeutics for major medical disorders? An international collaborative team sequenced the protein-coding regions of 10,503 adults in Pakistan, looking first for insights about cardiovascular and metabolic diseases.

We have long known that asthma occurs more frequently in adult women than in adult men; the reasons for this contrast are not completely understood. The authors sought to find out whether different demographic factors are associated with women's asthma than with men's.

The Bayesian nonparametric approach can yield a more complete, more accurate measure of how effective a health intervention—an incentive to adopt a new exercise regimen, for example—truly is.

The authors sought to improve the accuracy of magnetic resonance imaging for diagnosing Alzheimer's disease—a condition that is notoriously difficult to pin down.