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Methamphetamine Treatment Access: 78% Had Never Sought Care

MHD featured image for methamphetamine treatment access, stigma, and barriers to care in Australia.

A 2026 Australian interview study involving 27 adults with methamphetamine use problems found that 21 participants, or 77.8%, had never previously sought treatment for methamphetamine use. Research Highlights Most had never sought treatment: Peart et al. interviewed 27 adults and found that 77.8% had not previously sought methamphetamine treatment before entering the parent trial.1 3 …

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Prior Cocaine Use Disrupts Orbitofrontal Hidden-State Coding

MHD featured image for Prior Cocaine Use Disrupts Orbitofrontal Hidden-State Coding.

A 2026 eLife study recorded 3,881 lateral orbitofrontal cortex units in rats and found that prior cocaine use made the OFC over-distinguish task positions that controls treated as functionally equivalent. The headline result was not gross task failure: cocaine-experienced rats still performed the odor task, but their OFC ensembles showed higher S1-vs.-S2 decoding than sucrose …

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Drug Addiction Linked to Cortical Thinning in 65 of 68 Brain Regions

Photoreal illustration of a human brain with cortical regions highlighted across substance categories, representing the cross-substance morphometric pattern in addiction.

Whether alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and cannabis damage the same brain regions or different brain regions has been hard to settle in the addiction-imaging literature. A 2026 ENIGMA Addiction analysis by Georgiadis et al. — pooling 4,733 brains across 51 sites — now has an answer. Research Highlights Across 2,782 people with substance use disorder (SUD) …

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