MentalHealthDaily

Social Cognition After Stroke/TBI: Insula-Cingulate Hub

by GLOOM

Editorial card showing a stylized brain with the insula, cingulate, middle frontal gyrus, and corpus callosum highlighted, representing the convergent neural substrates of social cognition after acquired brain injury.

A 2026 PRISMA systematic review by Cavallo et al. in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience aggregates 43 neuroimaging studies of social cognition in adults with stroke or traumatic brain injury and finds the same handful of regions implicated again and again: the insula, cingulate cortex, middle frontal gyrus, and corpus callosum.1 Research Highlights Stroke/TBI social-cognition …

Chronic Pain Plus Depression Alters Brain Structure

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of brain regions affected by overlapping pain and depression networks, conveying comorbid neural signature.

A 2026 UK Biobank MRI preprint involving 71,214 adults found that chronic pain plus current depression had a structural brain profile that was more than chronic pain plus depression pasted together. The 1,377-person comorbid group showed widespread lower cortical volume, lower bilateral thalamic and hippocampal volume, lower left accumbens volume, and broad white-matter microstructure differences …