BackgroundInflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is recognized as a prototypical disorder of brain-gut interaction. Although neuroimaging research in this field has advanced rapidly in recent years, the findings remain fragmented across multiple disciplines, and a systematic integration of the literature is lacking.ObjectiveThis study presents the first integrated bibliometric analysis and literature review to map the landscape and evolving trends of neuroimaging research in IBD over the past two decades and to identify the knowledge base and research frontiers.MethodsWe conducted a systematic search of the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus databases for IBD-related neuroimaging literature published between January 2000 and January 2026. Following the PRISMA guidelines, two independent reviewers screened titles, abstracts, and full texts. A total of 175 articles met the inclusion criteria. Data were extracted on study characteristics, neuroimaging modalities, and clinical findings. For the synthesis, we employed a dual approach: (1) a bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer, Biblioshiny, and CiteSpace to map publication trends, collaboration networks, and research hotspots; and (2) a structured literature review across five predefined dimensions: technical modalities, brain region–symptom associations, subtype differences, mechanistic pathways, and clinical translation.ResultsThe systematic search and selection process identified 175 articles for final synthesis. The field has entered a phase of rapid expansion since 2021, with China and the United States as core contributing countries. Emerging frontiers include the “brain-gut axis” and the “default mode network.” The literature synthesis indicates that: (1) brain alterations are predominantly localized within an emotional and interoceptive network (anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and amygdala), with abnormalities generally associated with abdominal pain, anxiety, and depression; and (2) Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis appear to exhibit distinguishable neuroimaging phenotypes, though direct comparative studies remain limited.ConclusionThis study systematically clarifies the knowledge structure of the IBD neuroimaging field, demonstrates that the available neuroimaging evidence is consistent with the brain-gut axis as a central theoretical framework, and identifies subtype-specific neural characteristics. Future efforts should prioritize large-sample multicenter validation, longitudinal designs capable of testing mechanistic hypotheses, and multimodal data integration to transition the field from descriptive observations toward clinically meaningful applications,though substantial barriers—including small sample sizes, methodological heterogeneity, and lack of standardization—must first be overcome.
Spectral EEG-guided adaptive neuromodulation for social anxiety disorder, performance-only subtype: a case report
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is often complicated by anticipatory anxiety, hyperarousal, and variability in response to first-line treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and pharmacotherapy. These limitations highlight the need for adjunctive modalities capable of enhancing the magnitude and durability of treatment response. This case report explores outcomes following spectral EEG-guided personalized repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (PrTMS) in a patient with SAD, performance-only subtype. Weekly psychometric assessments revealed reductions in social anxiety intensity, avoidance behaviors, and negative self-appraisal, along with improvements in mood and daily function. Symptom changes were quantified using the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS), Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN), Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-Item Scale (GAD-7), and Quality of Life Enjoyment and Satisfaction Questionnaire Short Form (Q-LES-Q-SF). Clinical improvements were accompanied by increased alpha band power, decreased delta band power, and an increased alpha-delta ratio on serial spectral resting-state EEGs. Our findings suggest that PrTMS may warrant further investigation as a potential adjunctive treatment for SAD. Further large-scale, blinded, and randomized studies are warranted to validate our observations on the feasibility of PrTMS for SAD.
A Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Study to Evaluate Dopamine D2 and D3 Receptor Occupancy by SIPI6398
Conditions: Schizophrenia Disorder
Interventions: Drug: SIPI6398 Tablets
Sponsors: Shanghai Zhongze Therapeutics Co., Ltd.; Yale University
Not yet recruiting
Interventions: Drug: SIPI6398 Tablets
Sponsors: Shanghai Zhongze Therapeutics Co., Ltd.; Yale University
Not yet recruiting
Reduced serum cortisol, IGF-1, GLP-1, and T3 levels in medication-free children and adolescents with obsessive–compulsive disorder: a case–control study
IntroductionObsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) frequently emerges during childhood and adolescence and has been associated with alterations in multiple neurobiological systems. Neuroendocrine pathways involved in stress regulation, neurodevelopment, metabolic signaling, and thyroid function interact closely to influence brain circuits implicated in OCD. However, studies simultaneously examining several neuroendocrine parameters in pediatric OCD remain limited.MethodsThis case–control study included 52 medication-free children and adolescents with OCD and 42 healthy controls aged 8–17 years. Psychiatric diagnoses were established using the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children—Present and Lifetime Version (K-SADS-PL) according to DSM-5 criteria. Obsessive–compulsive symptom severity was assessed using the Children’s Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (CY-BOCS). Anxiety and depressive symptoms were evaluated using the Screen for Child Anxiety Related Emotional Disorders (SCARED) and the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI), respectively. Serum levels of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH), cortisol, growth hormone (GH), Insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), relaxin-3 (RLN-3), triiodothyronine (T3), and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) were measured using ELISA. Group differences were examined using covariance-based models controlling for age, sex, BMI percentile, anxiety (SCARED), and depressive symptoms (CDI).ResultsInitial analyses showed that children and adolescents with OCD had significantly lower serum levels of cortisol, IGF-1, GLP-1, and T3 compared with healthy controls. These differences remained significant after controlling for age, sex, BMI percentile, and the SCARED and CDI total score, with adjusted analyses showing lower levels of cortisol (p = 0.003), IGF-1 (p = 0.013), GLP-1 (p = 0.017), and T3 (p = 0.015) in the OCD group. Correlation analyses did not reveal significant associations between biochemical parameters and OCD symptom severity after correction for multiple comparisons.DiscussionThese findings suggest that pediatric OCD may be associated with alterations in several neuroendocrine pathways rather than isolated changes within a single hormonal system. Further longitudinal studies are needed to better clarify the biological basis and clinical significance of these findings.
A brainstem pathway underlying vagal modulation of somatic pain and affective states
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 03 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02313-0
This study identifies a brainstem pathway through which vagus nerve stimulation reduces pain and negative affect, showing how the caudal nucleus of the solitary tract transforms pain signals and regulates pain-related dopamine responses.
The representational geometry of emotional states in basolateral amygdala
Nature Neuroscience, Published online: 03 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41593-026-02315-y
O’Neill, Posani and colleagues show that while single amygdala neurons encode multiple emotional state-related variables (for example, valence, fear and safety), population-level geometry can enable one variable to be read out cleanly without interference.
COVID-19 Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices and Perceived Risk: Cross-Sectional Mixed Methods Study
Background: The COVID-19 pandemic was marked by rapidly evolving and inconsistent public health messaging, contributing to confusion regarding recommended preventive behaviors. Knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) and perceived risk frameworks offer a structured approach to examine how education, personal beliefs, and contextual factors influence health behaviors during public health emergencies. Vulnerable populations, such as patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), experience heightened risk perception compared with the general population, which may further shape behavioral responses. Objective: This study aimed to examine COVID-19–related KAP and perceived risk among patients with MS, health care providers, and laypeople during the first 6 months of the pandemic. The aim of mixed methods was to explore quantitative factors associated with KAP and perceived risk and to qualitatively describe participants’ perceptions and emotional responses to the pandemic. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, partially mixed methods explanatory sequential design was used. Participants were recruited using convenience sampling and completed an online demographic questionnaire and a COVID-19 KAP instrument that included perceived risk items. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and inferential analyses to examine group differences and associations between perceived risk and preventive behaviors. Chi-square testing was applied to compare perceived risk across groups, and correlational analyses were used to examine the relationships between perceived risk and behavioral practices. Qualitative comments provided by participants were analyzed using thematic analysis to further contextualize quantitative findings and to explore perceived risk experiences. Results: A total of 148 participants were included, comprising 43 (29%) individuals with MS, 50 (33.8%) health care providers, and 55 (37.2%) laypeople. Overall, 90% (n=133) of participants demonstrated basic knowledge of COVID-19 transmission and prevention. Attitudes toward public health guidance and self-reported preventive behaviors varied across groups. Lay participants most frequently reported a moderate perceived risk of COVID-19 infection, whereas participants with MS and health care providers more commonly reported high perceived risk (²=12.65, =.049). Neither immunosuppressive treatment status nor vaccine hesitancy significantly predicted perceived risk. However, higher perceived risk was significantly associated with greater avoidance of crowded and public places. Qualitative analysis yielded 5 interrelated themes describing participants’ perceived risk experiences: uncertainty related to evolving scientific information; anxiety regarding personal and family safety; fear of infection and long-term consequences; vulnerability, particularly among individuals with chronic illness and frontline exposure; and accountability toward protecting others through adherence to preventive measures. These themes provided contextual insight into the emotional and cognitive processes underlying reported attitudes and behaviors. Conclusions: Knowledge of COVID-19 is associated with favorable attitudes and engagement in preventive practices across populations. Differences in perceived risk highlight the importance of tailoring risk communication and educational strategies to specific populations. KAP-focused educational interventions that explicitly address uncertainty, emotional responses, and behavioral translation may strengthen preparedness and promote sustained protective behaviors during future public health emergencies. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT07021716; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT07021716
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Wireless Stress Detector Offers Multiple Medical Uses
A next-generation device that detects signs of stress could have wide-ranging applications, from investigating sleep disorders to detecting signs of sepsis.
The polygraph detector, described in Science Advances, is worn on the chest and can even sense when a person is lying.
It allows psychophysiological states to be continuously monitored through a combination of multimodal sensing and wireless data transmission.
The gadget offers an alternative to current approaches such as such as polygraphy and polysomnography (PSG), which involve cumbersome wired sensors that limit their practicality.
“By uncovering mechanistic links between autonomic imbalance, stress reactivity, and health outcomes, these devices have the potential to transform diagnostic workflows, optimize educational programs, and enable personalized therapeutic monitoring across stress medicine, pediatrics, and behavioral health,” reported Sun Hong Kim, PhD, from the University of Seoul in South Korea, and co-workers.
Subtle physiological variations in cardiac, respiratory, electrodermal, and thermal activity often serve as indicators of compromised health or heightened stress responses.
These can be reflected in many scenarios, from pediatric sleep disorders that disrupt neurodevelopment to the psychological strain experienced in high-stakes clinical settings or during polygraph examinations.
Accurate monitoring of psychophysiological states is therefore essential for understanding how stress and autonomic dysfunction manifest across a wide spectrum of medical conditions.
However, most existing devices monitor only one or two parameters or rely on electrochemical sensors that detect sweat biomarkers, thereby failing to reflect the complex and dynamic interplay between multiple physiological systems.
Kim and co-workers therefore designed a single platform to enable comprehensive assessment of autonomic and stress-related physiology in real time.
The device continuously measures changes in heartbeat, skin temperature, and breathing, which are then converted using machine learning into measures of psychological strain.
The device had high fidelity with gold standard systems in quantifying the complex psychological stress induced by polygraph interviews and complex cognitive load tasks as well as the physical stress caused by repeatedly putting a hand in an iced water.
During overnight monitoring of children, it reliably identified arousals, hypopnea, and apnea while revealing disease-specific autonomic signatures among infants with Down syndrome.
Real-world deployment during emergency simulation training showed that multimodal stress signatures correlate inversely with performance, reflecting its value for medical education.
Machine learning analyses across all studies confirmed that multimodal features outperformed single-signal approaches in detecting stress and clinical events with high sensitivity and specificity.
“A particularly notable contribution lies in pediatric sleep medicine,” the authors noted.
“Simultaneous comparison with PSG confirms the ability to detect arousals, hypopnea, and apnea while also providing mechanistic insights into autonomic regulation.
“In infants with Down syndrome, multimodal analysis reveals attenuated sympathetic responsiveness and parasympathetic dominance, consistent with known vulnerabilities in airway patency and autonomic control.
“Such disease-specific autonomic signatures may serve as valuable biomarkers for risk stratification, early diagnosis, and targeted intervention in neurodevelopmental disorders.”
The post Wireless Stress Detector Offers Multiple Medical Uses appeared first on Inside Precision Medicine.
Internalizing and externalizing pathways to internet gaming disorder: the roles of anger and social anxiety
BackgroundInternet Gaming Disorder (IGD) represents a significant behavioral health concern, yet the roles of internalizing and externalizing psychological vulnerabilities in its development remain underexplored, particularly in Arabic-speaking populations.ObjectiveThis study examined anger and social anxiety as distinct externalizing and internalizing predictors of IGD severity in a Saudi Arabian community sample.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was administered to 303 participants (60.1% female; estimated mean age = 29.79 years, SD = 8.83) across five regions of Saudi Arabia. Participants completed the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale–Short Form (IGDS9-SF), a three-item Anger Screening Scale, and a two-item Social Anxiety screener. Hierarchical linear regression and structural equation modeling (SEM) were conducted to examine unique and incremental contributions of anger and social anxiety to IGD symptoms.ResultsAnger and social anxiety were strongly intercorrelated (r = .86, p <.001) but demonstrated divergent patterns in multivariate models. Hierarchical regression indicated that both predictors contributed unique variance when entered simultaneously, with anger positively and social anxiety negatively predicting IGD after controlling for shared variance. However, SEM clarified that only social anxiety significantly predicted latent IGD severity (β = .32, p = .027), whereas anger did not (β = .07, p = .68). The final model explained approximately 13% of variance in IGD symptoms.ConclusionsSocial anxiety was associated with IGD severity as a distinct internalizing correlate, consistent with avoidance-based coping and online social preference accounts. These preliminary, cross-sectional findings suggest that social anxiety warrants consideration in future IGD screening and research efforts in Arabic-speaking contexts.
Oral Small-Molecule GLP-1s Linked to Deep Brain Activity and Reduced Cravings in Mice
Interest in glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s) continues to surge due to their effectiveness in reducing body weight and improving metabolic outcomes. This includes interest in small molecule oral GLP-1s which are more bioavailable and more easily manufactured than their injectable counterparts.
Now data from a new study in mice performed by scientists at the University of Virginia shows that this emerging class of weight-loss drugs suppress hedonic eating by modulating a reward circuit deep in the brain that is separate from previously described mechanisms that broadly affect appetite. The scientists believe that this pathway could be an avenue by which GLP-1s treat other dysfunctions in reward processing such as substance use disorders.
Details of the National Institutes of Health-funded study were published this week in a Nature paper titled “A brain reward circuit inhibited by next-generation weight-loss drugs in mice.” In it, the team reported that they investigated the small-molecule GLP-1s including Eli Lilly’s recently approved drug orforglipron, also known by the brand name Foundayo, as well as danuglipron, an oral GLP-1 that was being developed by Pfizer until the company decided to discontinue its development in 2025.
Previous studies that explored the effects of larger peptide GLP-1s such as semaglutide in the brain have found that they suppress hunger-driven eating by engaging networks in the hypothalamus and hindbrain. What has been less clear is the mechanism by which small-molecule GLP-1s work. “As the accessibility of these medications continues to rise and patient uptake increases, it’s crucial that we understand the neural mechanisms underlying the effects we’re seeing,” said Lorenzo Leggio, MD, PhD, clinical director of NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse.
The current study gets scientists one step closer to that goal. According to the paper, the scientists first used gene editing to modify the GLP-1 receptors of mice to make them more humanlike. They then administered orforglipron or danuglipron to the mice, and identified brain regions where the drugs induced activity. The results showed that in addition to inducing activity in familiar pathways, the drugs also triggered the central amygdala, a region associated with desire that is deeper in the brain than scientists previously thought GLP-1s could directly reach. Further testing showed that once activated, the central amygdala reduced the release of dopamine into key hubs of the brain’s reward circuitry during hedonic feeding.
“We’ve known that GLP-1 drugs suppress feeding behavior driven by energy demand,” said co-corresponding author Ali Guler, PhD, a professor of biology at the University of Virginia. “Now it seems oral small-molecule GLP-1s also dial back eating for pleasure by engaging a brain reward circuit.”
Given the effect of these drugs on eating for pleasure, future studies could explore whether small-molecule GLP-1s can also suppress cravings for other addictive substances. It is a question that the team hopes to explore in follow up studies focused specifically on substance use disorder.
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