Health

According to the most recent Monitoring the Future survey, teen drug use remains at historic lows for the fifth year in a row. The survey, conducted from February through June of last year by the National Institutes of Health, found that the five-year decrease in drug use that began during the COVID-19 pandemic has held for most substances ever since. Many experts and parents believed that the end of social distancing measures when the pandemic ended would see abuse levels among teens rise again, but this hasn’t been the case. Instead, 91 percent of eighth graders, 82 percent of tenth graders, and 66 percent of high school seniors reported that they didn’t use marijuana, alcohol, or nicotine in the month prior to the survey.

Nature Medicine, Published online: 26 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-026-04223-x

Publisher Correction: Interpretable inflammation landscape of circulating immune cells

Nature Medicine, Published online: 23 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04198-1

We propose straightforward principles to foster an evaluation-forward operating system that can transform the adoption of clinical artificial intelligence from a leap of faith into a stepwise, trust-building process.

Nature Medicine, Published online: 23 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04174-9

Reorienting Ebola care toward human-centered sustainable practice

Nature Medicine, Published online: 22 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04136-1

Profiling over 6.5 million peripheral blood mononuclear cells from 1,047 patients and 19 diseases at a single-cell transcriptome resolution led to a comprehensive model of inflammation in circulating immune cells. Leveraging this foundational resource enabled us to identify disease-driving inflammatory mechanisms and to build a foundation for a universal diagnostic classification framework.

Nature Medicine, Published online: 21 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04167-8

The Translational Research and Innovation Laboratory (TRAIL) model for accelerating discovery through a shared institutional resource

Nature Medicine, Published online: 21 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04129-0

Ancestry-aware genomic analyses of 6,011 people from the Mexican Biobank characterized allele frequency variation in 42,769 clinically relevant variants across Mexico, accounting for local ancestry and fine-scale geography. Results are accessible through a web-based application, MexVar, to enable data exploration and to foster biomedical research in Hispanic populations.

Nature Medicine, Published online: 21 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04142-3

Rising demand for dialysis poses a central challenge to universal health coverage systems: not just whether to expand access, but how to sustain equitable, high-quality kidney failure care. In this Comment, I argue that long-term viability depends on system architecture, rather than modality choice alone.

Nature Medicine, Published online: 21 January 2026; doi:10.1038/s41591-025-04187-4

The first Nature Portfolio Commission Report outlines paths to sustainable dialysis policies, robust evidence-to-policy translation and south–south collaboration.

Wondering what actions you can take to make a real difference for global heating? The world’s top climate scientists ranked voting for politicians who back strong climate measures as the number-one most effective move you can make. After that, reducing air travel, eating less meat, and cutting emissions from home heating and cooling systems are the best steps individuals can take.