Burrows et al. looked at people with stimulant use disorder (SUD), such as methamphetamine or amphetamine addiction, to better understand how drug use affects both the immune system and the brain. People with SUD showed higher levels of an inflammatory marker (sICAM-1), in their blood compared to those without SUD. Using brain scans (fMRI), researchers found that higher inflammation was linked to reduced activity in the brain’s reward center (nucleus accumbens) during anticipation of rewards and increased amygdala activity during attention to bodily sensations. These findings suggest that inflammation may contribute to altered reward and emotional processing in SUD. Targeting inflammatory pathways could represent a novel strategy for improving treatment outcomes.

In this article, Dr. Choquette and colleagues (Choquette et al., 2023) study a mind-body intervention called Floatation-REST (Reduced Environmental Stimulation Therapy via floatation), which involves floating in a quiet, dark pool filled with warm water highly concentrated with Epsom Salt. The goal is to reduce external stimuli (i.e., sound, light, etc.) and enhance one's attention to their internal body signals. In this study, women and adolescent girls were recruited from a residential eating disorder program and received either their usual treatment or usual treatment plus eight one-hour float sessions.

Two clinical features of anorexia nervosa are body image dissatisfaction and increased anxiety. The researchers found that after each float session, participants reported large and immediate reductions in anxiety and body dissatisfaction. These improvements did not occur in the group receiving usual care alone. Even more encouraging, six months later, the group who completed the float sessions continued to show lower body image dissatisfaction compared to the usual care group. Because body image dissatisfaction is linked to poorer long-term recovery, these findings suggest that Floatation-REST may be a promising tool for reducing anxiety and improving body image in people with anorexia nervosa.

Why does neurofeedback training help some patients with depression but not others?
​Research by Misaki et al. (2025) suggests that the answer lies not in the target region, the amygdala, but in whole-brain activity. The study shows that treatment success depends on specific neural strategies rather than localized activation alone, advancing our understanding of personalized psychiatric care.

​Drugs are potent reinforcers biasing value-based decisions at the expense of non-drug rewards through poorly understood neurocomputational processes. Cross-species work suggests valuation is context-dependent, which may account for the over-selection of drug-related actions. In line with the theory of addiction as a form of maladaptive referent-dependent evaluation, we tested whether recent opioid exposure impacts range adaptation in OUD. Using a validated task probing contextual valuation, we extended previous work on healthy subjects to individuals who reported recent use (<90 days) or had abstained from opioid use (≥ 90 days) and comparison controls. Using computational modeling, we assessed whether participants made their decisions using a context-dependent valuation or assuming an objective value encoding. While most controls and ≥90-day abstinent OUD seemed to use contextual valuation, recent users were more prone to encode objective values. Interestingly, the degree of reliance on contextual valuation correlated with abstinence duration and subjective craving/withdrawal. Take-away: Reduced context adaptation to available rewards could explain difficulty deciding about smaller (typically non-drug) rewards in the aftermath of drug exposure.