Mind & body, in brief

Sewage tests by scientists at the Home Office, the UK's interior ministry, suggest cocaine use in England rose 26% between 2021 and 2025. [1]

They estimate people in England took 123,000kg of cocaine in 2024-25, about 2.5 billion lines, worth about £9.8bn on the street. [1]

Yet the number of people telling the Crime Survey for England and Wales they used cocaine in the past year has stayed flat or fallen slightly since the pandemic. [1]

That suggests a similar number of people are taking more, more often, though the survey also misses homeless people and those living in institutions. [1]

In England, 33,612 people started treatment for cocaine problems in 2024-25, up 57% from 2019-20. [1]

Deaths from cocaine in England and Wales are at a record, and more than half of those registered last year were people over 40. [1]

Overdose deaths from cocaine often involve heart problems, and years of use add to the risk, says Josh Torrance, a researcher who studies drug markets. [1]

Torrance tracks dealers' prices: an ounce fell from about £1,300 in March 2022 to £1,000 by August 2023 and about £700 by September 2025. [1]

It then jumped to about £1,000 in July 2026, a rise Torrance says he has never seen so fast, and was about £950 in September. [1]

Cocaine sold as pure is often 70-80% pure, Torrance says, and in his view cheaper, stronger cocaine means more use and more deaths. [1]

Police in 39 forces recorded almost 30,000 crimes mentioning cocaine in 2025, a rate 10% higher than in 2019, the Guardian found. [1]

Home Office figures suggest nearly six in 10 drug tests on people arrested over domestic abuse were positive for cocaine between July 2025 and June 2026. [1]

Why it matters. Watch whether the summer price rise holds: the National Crime Agency also sees signs of wholesale prices rising in 2026, and Torrance links cheap cocaine to more use and more deaths. [1]

Oregon's law, in force since July 2024, makes hospitals check almost every patient for financial aid, instead of waiting for an application. [11] At Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), one of the state's largest hospitals, 64% of patients then qualified automatically, up from 12%. [11] Across about two-thirds of Oregon hospitals, spending on free and cheaper care rose from 1.4% to 2.7% of running costs. [11] In April, after hospitals warned of strain, the state raised the bill size that triggers an automatic check from $500 to $1,500. [11]

Why it matters. In Texas, which has no such duty, 44% of nonprofit hospitals say they send a bill before checking whether a patient qualifies. [12] Oregon's hospitals expect the state's uninsured rate to climb from about 3% to 10% or more as US federal cuts land. [11] Hospitals say they are feeling more financial pressure. [11]

Margaret Owen, 93, lay on her floor in Abercynon, south Wales, for about 10 and a half hours after a fall on 4 October, with a broken thigh bone and shoulder. [14] Her son says an ambulance was called at 07:35, a St John Ambulance worker came at 15:30, and an ambulance came 90 minutes later. [14] She has dementia and is still in hospital after surgery. [14] The Welsh Ambulance Service said it was sorry and that a first review found parts of the call's handling need investigating. [14]

Why it matters. Her wait was not rare: 10,977 patients in Wales waited 12 hours or more for an ambulance in August. [14] The typical wait for serious 'orange' calls rose to nearly an hour and a half, and the Welsh government says a new emergency care plan comes this autumn. [14]

Researchers in Taiwan compared the health records of 24,103 adults with obesity and depression who began tirzepatide, the drug sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound, with 24,103 matched adults starting other weight-loss drugs. [13] The tirzepatide group had a 37% lower risk of recorded suicidal thoughts. [13] Anxiety, sleep problems and deaths from any cause were also recorded less often. [13] The study appeared on Sunday in Translational Psychiatry, a Nature journal. [13]

Why it matters. The authors say the link is not proof the drug prevents suicidal thoughts, because nobody was given it at random. [13] Its safety for the mind had been uncertain in people with depression, and these records point away from a raised risk. [13] Suicidal thoughts are a matter for a doctor or a crisis line.

Clocks in the UK went back an hour at 02:00 on Sunday 25 October, and most of Europe changed on the same day. [8] The change was brought in to save energy during the First World War. [10] North America changes on 1 November and Egypt on 30 October. [8] In Jersey, a self-governing island off France, former senator Jimmy Perchard says he regrets losing his 2008 vote to join Central European Time, which 6,564 of nearly 24,000 voters backed. [7] The UK government says it has no plans to change. [7]

Why it matters. Lighter winter evenings would suit walkers, tourism and harbours, while farmers and children on the way to school would get darker mornings. [7] A study of English health records, published last December, found fewer recorded cases of depression, anxiety and heart disease in the week after the autumn change. [9]

Parents and allergy charities trained teachers at Regent House School in Newtownards, Northern Ireland, on Friday to care for pupils with severe allergies. [15] In England, Benedict's law came into force in September, requiring every school to train staff and keep life-saving allergy pens. [15] It is named after Benedict Blythe, who died aged five after contact with cow's milk protein at his school in 2021. [15] Northern Ireland's education minister, Paul Givan, has promised a consultation before the end of 2026. [15]

Why it matters. Until then, safety in Northern Ireland's schools rests on each school's goodwill, which Niamh Kennedy of Food Allergy NI, a volunteer group, says leads to huge variation. [15] She estimates about two children in every class may have a food allergy. [15]

Macmillan Cancer Support Jersey, a charity on the Channel island, says counselling and deeper emotional-support sessions rose from 407 in 2021 to 835 in 2025, up 105%. [16] Complementary therapy sessions rose from 405 to a record 965. [16] It gave 4,253 support sessions in 2025, and 308 people used its drop-in centre without a referral. [16] Its plan for 2026 to 2030 adds more emotional and group support. [16]

Why it matters. Its chief executive, Steph Gibaut, says demand keeps growing and people's needs are changing. [16] The charity raised £963,090 in 2025 and put £890,352 into its work for islanders with cancer. [16]

Researchers in Lausanne, Switzerland, tested whether someone could find out whose genome an anonymous research sample is, by comparing traits predicted from the DNA with a person's known traits. [17] In a lab test where half the pairs were true matches, their method found 40% of them, and more than 99% of the matches it claimed were right. [17] In realistic settings, fewer than 0.13% of its claimed matches would be right. [17] Guessing who carries APOE-e4, a gene variant linked to Alzheimer's disease, also mostly failed. [17]

Why it matters. The team tested it on data from UK Biobank, a research bank of volunteers' DNA. [17] It concludes the attack is possible in theory but of limited use in real conditions. [17]

Scientists put mice through repeated attacks by other mice, a common lab stress test, and found a protein called HINT1 rose in the brains of the worst affected. [18] Adding more HINT1 to the hippocampus, a brain area for memory and mood, made mice act depressed, and lowering it had the opposite effect. [18] A chemical that blocks HINT1 reversed the changes. [18] The study appeared in Molecular Psychiatry on Sunday. [18]

Why it matters. HINT1 had already been linked to depression in people, and this shows one way it may act in the brain. [18] The work is in mice only, so it says nothing yet about treating people.

Head-direction cells, in a part of the brain called the thalamus, work like an inner compass that tracks which way the head points. [19] Scientists found that holding a mouse's head still, as many lab experiments do, scrambled that compass. [19] The signal came back a few hundred milliseconds before the mouse started to walk, as if the brain used its own plan to move. [19] The study, in Nature Communications, says the usual models of this compass need revising. [19]

Why it matters. Many brain experiments hold an animal's head in place, and this study set out to test what that does to the brain's compass. [19] Its answer is that some of what such experiments record comes from the hold itself. [19]

Researchers at Mount Sinai, a New York hospital, asked whether denser bones raise the risk of spinal stenosis, a narrowing inside the spine that can press on nerves. [21] They used genetic data from Finland's FinnGen study, with 26,090 cases, and from UK Biobank. [21] People whose genes predict denser heel bones had about 9% higher odds of it. [21] Those genes did not predict the operation used to widen the spine. [21]

Why it matters. The study read genes as a natural experiment, which is stronger than a plain comparison but is still not a trial. [21] It appeared in Scientific Reports on Sunday. [21]

A study of 105 women of childbearing age compared the mix of bacteria in the vagina with questionnaires on anxiety, stress, mood and drive. [20] Women with a mixed pattern, not led by Lactobacillus bacteria, scored lower on drive and on how strongly they respond to rewards. [20] Chemicals in the vagina tracked the scores more closely than the bacteria themselves. [20] The study appeared in Scientific Reports on Sunday. [20]

Why it matters. It shows patterns in one small group at one moment, not that bacteria change mood, and the authors call parts of their analysis exploratory. [20]