Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is a common condition that, for a lot of people, is difficult to treat. The drugs that exist have a number of adverse side effects, and about 25 percent of patients don’t respond to existing drugs. And so a team of researchers in Iceland, led by Karl Karlsson, professor of biomolecular engineering at Reykjavik University, undertook a number of different steps to narrow in on and then test what the team has determined to be a novel treatment for ...
Jun 04, 2025•10 min
Draulio Araujo, professor at the Brain Institute in the University of Rio Grande Norte in Natal, Brazil, has been studying ayahuasca for more than 20 years. It’s a psychedelic plant used in rituals in South America that has also been researched for its potential to treat depression. The effects of ayahuasca can last for hours and also lead to side effects including vomiting and diarrhea. The active psychedelic drug in ayahuasca is DMT, and so Dr. Araujo and his colleagues decided to conduct the ...
Apr 18, 2025•10 min
New drugs that target the endocannabinoid system are being proposed for disorders that are usually characterized by the dysregulation of social processing, like social anxiety disorder and autism spectrum disorder. Researchers have been trying to understand the mechanisms for how these drugs work. Leah Mayo is assistant professor at the University of Calgary, and she’s one of the authors of a new study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology in which they examined two aspects of the system. One i...
Mar 04, 2025•9 min
The scientific literature has shown that females demonstrate more aversion to risk-taking than males. Studies have also demonstrated that the basal lateral amygdala, or BLA, is a critical hub for processing risk and reward information. And yet further research has shown that activity in the amygdala differs between males and females, and that the expression of particular dopamine receptors called D2 receptors are greater in females than in males. The authors hypothesized that one mediating mecha...
Jan 15, 2025•10 min
The menstrual cycle is known to affect things like mood and changes in pain. But there can also be symptoms that have a serious impact on a person’s function, ability to work, ability to maintain friendships and romantic relationships. This is a rare condition known as premenstrual dysphoric disorder. But it’s not the only psychiatric condition that can worsen with changes in the menstrual cycle. For instance, nearly 60 percent of menstruating patients with depression can experience cyclical wor...
Dec 02, 2024•10 min
Researchers are interested in understanding the biology of why some people are more likely to overconsume substances. Some substances are difficult to study—people might not admit to illegal substance abuse or to how much alcohol they drink. But Americans are more likely to accurately recall and share how much coffee they drink—which is related to how much caffeine they consume. And so a team of researchers paired up with the company 23 and Me to try to understand genetic differences among a lar...
Aug 21, 2024•10 min
Scientists have been amassing an increasing amount of evidence about the impact of racial discrimination and racial trauma, including how it can have an impact on brain regions involved with threat vigilance and emotional regulation. At the same time, there’s evidence that increased engagement in those areas has been linked to increased risk of mental health problems like depression, and they also suspect it could be a vulnerability for brain health issues such as dementia and Alzheimer’s diseas...
Jun 21, 2024•10 min
There’s a hormone called ghrelin that’s secreted in the stomach, and when someone is hungry it contributes to that feeling of hunger and the need to search for food. But neurological studies have suggested that ghrelin might also play a role in compulsivity and impulsivity, and it might be related to substance use disorders. Rebecca Boeme is an assistant professor at Linkoping University in Sweden. She and her colleagues decided to use human subjects to investigate how ghrelin affects reinforcem...
May 06, 2024•9 min
Dr. Nicole Petersen is an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCLA. Her commentary is a new paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, called “Spotlighting SHAPERS: sex hormones associated with psychological and endocrine roles.” Dr. Petersen starts the paper describing an unnamed signaling molecule that can affect the physical structure of the brain and that seems to be related to a wide number of psychological and neurological conditions. Then she ...
Mar 05, 2024•9 min
Serotonin is a critical chemical when it comes to a number of psychiatric conditions, such as OCD, where it seems to play a particular role in cognitive flexibility. That is, serotonin levels are related to the fact that someone is perseverating on intrusive thoughts or compulsions and isn’t able to be as flexible as otherwise would be necessary. Trevor Robbins, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, is one of the authors of a recent study titled Comparable roles for...
Jan 04, 2024•10 min
The drug naloxone, otherwise known as Narcan, is a critical tool in reversing fentanyl overdoses and reducing mortality. But now fentanyl is appearing on the streets adulterated with a drug called xylazine. Justin Strickland, assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Cassandra Gipson-Reichardt, associate professor in the department of pharmacology nutritional sciences at the University of Kentucky, are the coauthors of a new paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacol...
Oct 16, 2023•10 min
Sanjay Mathew is a professor and vice chair for research at Baylor College of Medicine and director of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program. He’s one of the two authors of a recent review paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, “The why, when, where, how, and so what of so-called rapidly acting antidepressants.” With his colleague Alan Schatzberg, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and director of the Mood Disorders Center at Stanford University, they explore both the drugs ...
Sep 06, 2023•8 min
In-person treatment for substance use disorders is an incredibly important tool, but there’s a high failure rate — more than 50 percent of people who enter drop out within the first month. There hasn’t been a highly accurate method of identifying who might leave and who might succeed, and knowing this could help centers allocate resources to give the right type of assistance to the right people at the right time. One tool available is called the Addiction Severity Index, which is used to help id...
Jun 23, 2023•9 min
Antisocial personality disorder, or ASPD, is a difficult disorder to study. There have been studies on psychopathic individuals, and on youth with psychopathic traits, but most studies on ASPD to date have been on incarcerated adults. A team of researchers at Heidelberg University wanted to study individuals who are not incarcerated and see what these findings could elucidate about the brains, in particular the amygdalas, of individuals with ASPD. Haang Jeung-Maarse is a medical doctor at Bielfe...
Apr 21, 2023•9 min
It’s clear there are diversity issues in science, both in terms of who does or doesn’t receive research grants, as well as who is or isn’t represented at the highest levels of scientific research. When Caleb Weinreb and Daphne Sun began their PhD program at Harvard University Medical School in systems biology, they took this on as an issue. They learned from others in their department, and they eventually created a course on the topic for incoming first year PhD students. As they worked on impro...
Feb 22, 2023•10 min
Psychedelic drugs have received attention recently for their potential use as treatments for psychiatric disorders. Single, high doses of LSD have shown promise for treating depressive disorders. But there’s another way in which people have been using LSD, and it’s what’s known as micro-dosing, taking LSD at below noticeable levels, where it doesn’t seem to have a psychedelic impact—but users say it does in fact have an impact on their overall sense of well-being. This is just what Harriet de Wi...
Dec 22, 2022•10 min
After a traumatic event, women are more likely to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Research has been conducted on what might be causing this higher rate of diagnoses; for instance, perhaps women had more cumulative trauma in their lives than the men in question. But scientists say that even taking prior childhood trauma into account, women are still diagnosed at a higher rate than men. Alyssa Roeckner is a neuroscience PhD candidate at Emory University, she’s in the lab...
Nov 01, 2022•9 min
Maladaptive aggression, while not a diagnosable neuropsychiatric disorder on its own, often presents as an important comorbid condition with other neuropsychiatric disorders. But while both men and women can and do display aggression, there’s been a bias to thinking of aggression, in both its adaptive and maladaptive forms, as a male behavior. Sam Golden is an assistant professor at the University of Washington in the department of biological structure and also has an appointment in the Center f...
Sep 06, 2022•10 min
Sometimes, when researchers are conducting an experiment, the results are confusing. Maybe the control group of animals doesn’t behave the way a control should in theory be behaving. Maybe a researcher repeats a study and sees results that are unusually different from the first time around. The answers to these issues might lie in something called ‘hidden variables,’ according to a new study titled, “What’s wrong with my research? The impact of hidden variables on neuropsychopharmacology researc...
Jun 16, 2022•10 min
Kirstie Cummings and Sofia Beas are both new assistant professors in the department of neurobiology at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. When they met, they discussed the job application process, their support network, and their own personal processes, and they decided to write an article that could serve as a resource for candidates from different backgrounds, many of whom might not have the same resources that Dr. Cummings and Dr. Beas did. The result was their paper, “A Scientific Approa...
May 09, 2022•7 min
Driving while under the influence of THC, known as drugged driving, is becoming more of an issue as more states legalize cannabis for both medical and recreational use around the country. THC is known to impair cognitive and psychomotor performance and thus impair driving. Jodi Gilman is a neuroscientist and an associate professor of psychiatry at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and she’s one of the authors of a new study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. She says that im...
Feb 23, 2022•9 min
In the past, there had been a school of thought that looked at evolution linearly — that is, you could in theory draw a line among mammals as they evolved, and so, say, rodent brains would basically be less evolved primate brains. That turns out not to be true; evolution is much more like a branching tree, and each branch then goes on to develop independently, sometimes in parallel. Some groups of animals such as primates can evolve features of their brains that other groups simply don’t have. A...
Jan 31, 2022•9 min
Star-shaped cells called astrocytes are the most abundant cells to be found in the human brain. In the past, they’d been thought to play a supporting role to neurons, such as providing metabolic support, but recently they’re also emerging as stars of information processing. They can respond to neurotransmitters and release neuroactive substances that then affect synaptic transmission and plasticity. Michelle Corkrum is a child neurology resident at Columbia University and is one of the authors o...
Nov 01, 2021•10 min
Loneliness is a subjective experience, but neuroscientists define it as a distress that arrives from a discrepancy between perceived and desired social relationships. There may be an evolutionary benefit to the feeling of loneliness; we’re a social species, and feeling lonely might have sent us to seek out other humans, which has been very important for survival. Moreover, if gone unaddressed and isolation worsens, health effects of loneliness have been shown to double mortality rates. It's link...
Sep 13, 2021•8 min
It’s known that dopamine transmission in the brain, particularly in the frontal lobes, can affect decision-making and can regulate choices when it comes to actions and rewards. But the effect of dopamine transition in the medial orbital frontal cortex hasn’t yet been studied, and dysfunction in that region has been implicated in a variety of mental illnesses, including obsessive compulsive disorder, certain kinds of depression, and even schizophrenia. And so a team of researchers led by Stan Flo...
Jul 20, 2021•9 min
Nearly 25 years ago, a paper was published about addiction that transformed the field. The director of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse at the time called addiction a “brain disease,” and he wrote a paper articulating this position and the agenda that it implied. It led to a focus on researching the brain to understand the mechanisms behind addiction, which could lead to novel treatments. And it meant that the country began to treat addiction as a disease, thus treating it within the medi...
May 21, 2021•10 min
The world of medicine has been changing rapidly due to the increasing use of ‘big data.’ And there’s been a major revolution in this approach in neuroscience and psychiatry as well: computing power, sample sizes, neuroimaging technologies, digital approaches to phenotyping, and computational modeling all are already starting to unleash dramatic new understandings of the brain, as well as new approaches to treatment. And so the journal Neuropsychopharmacology recently published a Reviews issue on...
Mar 19, 2021•10 min
Interest is growing in the use of the psychedelic drug LSD for psychiatric research and even potentially for treatment. But placebo-controlled studies conducted to date have used just one dose of the drug—none have investigated the impacts of a variety of dosages within the same subjects. In addition, past studies did not use pharmaceutically-defined dosages of LSD, which has made verifying the effects of a particular dose difficult. To address this gap, Matthias Liechti, professor in the depart...
Jan 19, 2021•10 min
Scientists who study neuropsychiatric conditions and treatments often use rodent models to do so. From depression to anxiety to memory impairment and impulsivity, there are certain rodent behaviors that are used to represent these types of conditions in humans. And to use these models, researchers have had to watch the animals live or on video and jot down every instance of, say, exploratory behavior. As the process is labor intensive and results vary slightly from researcher to researcher, Dr. ...
Nov 04, 2020•10 min
The application of the study of genetics and the use of big data to identify patterns of inheritance as well as de novo mutations has had a dramatic impact on the field of Autism Spectrum Disorder research, and it offers pathways to a greater understanding of biological mechanisms, even potentially treatments. Matthew State, chair of the department of psychiatry at University of California San Francisco, and his colleagues wrote a review paper in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology , called “Lev...
Sep 23, 2020•10 min
