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TL;DR: In mice with a painful, inflamed paw, two separate sets of neurons in a pain-and-emotion brain area seemed to drive different side effects. One set, wired to the amygdala, controlled anxiety-like behavior, while the other, wired to a reward hub, control…
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TL;DR: A 2026 narrative review in International Journal of General Medicine argued that apathy in Alzheimer’s disease is tied to damage across motivation circuits, including the anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, striatum, locus coeruleus, and la…
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TL;DR: A 2026 preprint on medRxiv used multisite MRI data from 3,958 people with schizophrenia and 5,489 controls to map cortical network disruptions and identify two robust brain-structure subtypes. Key Findings 9,447 MRI participants: The analysis included 3…
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TL;DR: A 2026 meta-analysis in Psychological Medicine found that reduced resting-state connectivity between the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex was the most robust brain-network difference in anxiety disorders. Key Findings 15 datasets: The meta-analysi…
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TL;DR: A 2026 study in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience used task-based functional MRI (fMRI), a brain-scan method that tracks blood-oxygen changes during a task, to show that misophonia and hyperacusis had partly different brain connectivity pa…
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TL;DR: A 2026 MRI preprint on medRxiv found that patients with catatonia were less likely to have a left paracingulate sulcus (PCS), a stable anterior cingulate cortex fold, than psychiatric patients without catatonia. Key Findings 523 MRI scans: Researchers c…
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TL;DR: A 2026 study in Nature Communications found that different brain-connectivity measures predicted different parts of associative learning: functional connectivity predicted acquisition, structural connectivity predicted extinction learning, and effective…
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How Gene Therapy Mimicked Morphine for Chronic Pain TL;DR: A Nature study identified opioid-sensitive neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex and used a synthetic mu-opioid receptor promoter to silence them, producing morphine-like relief of chronic pain unpl…
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