Can EQ-5D-5L screen anxiety? Plus: sugar as an obesity proxy

This week we screened 775 hits and ended up with 86 qualified papers from about 460 authors across 32 countries.

So the funnel is wide, but the final set is fairly tight.

And that final set is smaller than last week, down from 98 to 86, a 12.2% drop.

The methods give one clue, not a proof, 19 surveys, 19 qualitative studies, and 12 quantitative papers, so a lot of work is close to lived experience, but may not clear a strict measurement and metrics bar.

The weird part is the search got bigger while the keeper pile got smaller.

Query hits rose from 706 to 775, up nearly 10%, which makes me ask whether broad themes like mental health, quality of life, and depression are pulling in more papers than the show can honestly call measurement work.

Country coverage moved the other way, 26 countries last week, 32 this week, up about 23%.

The top contributors are still concentrated, with the UK at 12 papers, the US and China at 6 each, and Germany at 5, and we can't say much below country because city and institution metadata are both zero.

The author mix also matters for how stable these metrics feel.

Of 462 authors, 85 are first-time authors, meaning their first-ever paper in this metadata, 182 are emerging, and 195 are experienced.

So the snapshot is not less activity.

It's more searchable activity, spread across more countries, with fewer papers making the cut.

Which fits the episode's through-line, well-being metrics keep claiming to measure lived reality, and the first test is whether our own filters can tell that apart from just more well-being language.