MentalHealthDaily

Stress Suppressed Food-Cue Reward Through NTS A2 Dopamine Circuits

by GLOOM

MHD featured image for stress, food cues, NTS A2 neurons, and dopamine reward circuitry.

A 2026 rat study found that foot-shock stress transiently reduced food-cue approach during the first 2 conditioned-stimulus trials (t = 2.807; P < 0.05), and inhibiting the nucleus of the solitary tract weakened that stress effect.1 The useful finding is selective: stress used an NTS-linked route to dampen cue-evoked VTA dopamine, while outcome-specific satiety reduced ...

Entorhinal Dopamine Fails Early in Alzheimer’s Mice

by GLOOM

Editorial card showing the lateral entorhinal cortex with dopamine projections from the midbrain, illustrating an early-Alzheimer's mechanism finding rescued by L-DOPA in mice.

A 2026 Nature Neuroscience study from the Igarashi lab proposes a circuit-level answer for why the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) is the first cortical region to falter in Alzheimer’s: dopamine inputs from the VTA and substantia nigra to the LEC go functionally silent at the earliest disease stage in an APP knock-in mouse — before …