Mass General Brigham researchers found that interactions between immune and brain cells drive fear responses, but treatment with psychedelics like MDMA and psilocybin may reverse these effects.

The new study suggests that fear and the immune system are connected in previously unknown ways. The researchers found that the immune system can influence stress and fear behaviors by changing how brain cells communicate.

The investigators further showed that psychedelic treatments could target these neuroimmune interactions and reduce stress-induced fear in preclinical models and found similar results in human tissue samples. Results are published in Nature.

Researchers have developed a personalized blood test that may offer a faster, less invasive way to track high-grade glioma progression.

Having higher numbers of particular gut microbes might put you at a higher risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS), a new twin study shows.

A new study investigated the brain circuits involved in psychosis—a condition characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking and detachment from reality.

Andrew Pines, MD, MA, a resident in the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a researcher in the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics, is the lead author of the paper published in JAMA Psychiatry titled “Mapping Lesions That Cause Psychosis to a Human Brain Circuit and Proposed Stimulation Target.”

Psychosis is the classic symptom of schizophrenia, a serious mental illness that causes marked disability in otherwise young and healthy patients. The researchers analyzed published cases in which focal brain damage caused psychosis, with the idea that if damaging a brain circuit causes a symptom, then mapping that circuit might tell us about how to treat that symptom.