NPP BrainPod

Insomnia and depression are two serious and debilitating conditions. Insomnia on its own is linked to an increase in suicide risk, and insomnia can also exacerbate the severity of depression.

Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, assistant professor in the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, and Adam Krause, post-doctoral research fellow in Stanford’s psychiatry department, are two of the authors of a recent study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI, is the gold standard for treating insomnia, and it’s been shown to relieve depressive symptoms as well.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-026-02431-0
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There are a number of theories that have been studied to try to explain addiction and drug use escalation, and thus to also create animal models of that behavior that can then serve to help develop treatments. One theory for escalation is that people feel worse and worse over time and so they take the drug to feel better. Another is that they just don’t get as much of a reaction to the drug and so need more and more of it to get the euphoria. And then there’s something called incentive salience, which is a craving for the drug.

Read the full study here: Incentive salience, not psychomotor sensitization or tolerance, drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats | Neuropsychopharmacology
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Oxytocin has become known for having anti-anxiety and affiliative behavioral effects. That’s why clinicians and researchers are excited about using oxytocin as a potential therapeutic.

Brian Trainor is a professor at UC Davis, and his lab has been studying this complexity for the past decade. For an animal model, they work with a territorial, aggressive, monogamous rodent species called California mice. If the male is removed and the female is forced to defend their nest, she will experience what’s known as social defeat, and she will exhibit what’s called inhibited affiliative behavior, the type that can be affected by oxytocin — and this effect can be studied in a mouse’s brain.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-026-02352-y
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Cannabis, which is increasingly legally available, both for therapeutic and recreational use, is now one of the most commonly used drugs worldwide. Of people who have ever used cannabis, studies vary, but they estimate that about 10-25 percent of people who use cannabis go on to develop cannabis use disorder.

Uri Bright is a postdoctoral associate at the Yale School of Medicine and is one of the authors of a recent study in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology on the genetics of cannabis lifetime use — which is anyone who has ever used cannabis even once. That’s a distinct population from people who have cannabis use disorder, as his colleagues had looked into in the previous study.
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Worry seems like something most people do from time to time, but for some people, severe worry can become an overwhelming sensation, and for older adults later in life, severe worry has been associated with an increased risk of stroke and coronary heart disease. Carmen Andreescu is a professor of psychiatry and bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She says mild worry is useful evolutionarily, to help us make plans or adapt behavior.

Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-025-02193-1
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