By Nancy Lapid
May 12 (Reuters) – Hello Health Rounds readers! Today we feature another example of how artificial intelligence can be beneficial in medical settings, in this case to monitor reproductive hormones to detect infertility causes in men and women. We also report on a study that found an alarming trend in medical research papers.
Wearable patches help diagnose unexplained infertility
A wearable skin sensor patch combined with artificial intelligence can monitor reproductive hormones over time to detect subtle fluctuations that might be contributing to patients’ fertility problems, two new studies show.
Men and women who appear hormonally normal may still have undetected disruptions in the timing and coordination of their reproductive hormones that could impair fertility, researchers said at the 28th European Congress of Endocrinology in Prague.
Hormone levels follow a circadian rhythm, rising and falling in regulated patterns throughout the day, they explained.
The developers of the patch had 102 men with or without infertility or symptoms related to sex hormone disturbances wear the patch for four days so that their testosterone levels could be measured every 15 minutes. All had normal testosterone levels on standard laboratory tests.
The men with symptoms had significantly disrupted testosterone rhythms, and the unmasked rhythm abnormalities were associated with reduced sperm concentration and symptoms of androgen deficiency, according to the researchers.
“For the first time, we have been able to track androgen patterns in real time over several days with a novel, non-invasive continuous AI-driven testosterone monitoring patch, compatible with Android and iPhone mobile devices,” study leader Dr. Tinatin Kutchukhidze from Oxford University and New Anglia University said in a statement.
“Previous research suggests that a normal morning testosterone level is sufficient to exclude clinically significant androgen deficiency,” Kutchukhidze said. “However, our findings challenge that assumption by demonstrating that men with normal serum testosterone may still exhibit marked disturbances in hormonal rhythmicity associated with reproductive dysfunction.”
In a separate study presented at the conference, Kutchukhidze’s team tracked 312 women with regular menstrual cycles who were fertile or had unexplained infertility.
With the AI-supported patch, they were able to identify fluctuations in hormone levels that predicted infertility, even in women with normal hormone levels on standard tests.
“A woman may have a seemingly healthy menstrual cycle and normal hormone levels but still experience hidden endocrine dysfunction that affects her ability to conceive,” said Kutchukhidze.
“Our AI-driven rhythm analyses were significantly better at identifying subclinical reproductive dysfunction than conventional testing, suggesting that both female and male endocrine disorders may not simply be disorders of hormone quantity, but rather disorders of hormonal timing, synchronisation and biological rhythm,” said Kutchukhidze.
Fake references in medical papers are skyrocketing
The numbers of papers in medical journals that “support” the arguments of studies by citing made-up research are skyrocketing, a new analysis found.
The researchers audited 2.5 million biomedical papers published from January 2023 through February 2026, which altogether cited more than 97 million references.
“In 2023, approximately one in 2,828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had risen to one in 458, and in the first 7 weeks of 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one fabricated reference,” according to their report.
The fabrication rate increased more than 12 times, from about four per 10,000 papers in 2023 to 57 per 10,000 papers in early 2026, the researchers said.
In May 2025, a U.S. government report on the health of American children referenced scientific studies that did not exist.
The authors of the current analysis said the fabricated references they identified were not obviously defective. They were topically specific, correctly formatted, attributed to real researchers, and contained plausible publication dates, they said.
“Scientific literature depends on the integrity of its references,” the study authors wrote in The Lancet.
“When references point to non-existent studies, readers, reviewers, and policy makers are unable to evaluate the evidence.”
The researchers called on publishers to develop automated reference verification tools that could “close this gap before fabricated references reach the published record.”
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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