Experiencing trauma in childhood can lead to a lack of motivation and less pleasure from rewards-or anhedonia-later in life.\u00a0In humans, childhood trauma is linked to\u00a0changes in the activity of\u00a0reward-related brain pathways stemming from an area called the hippocampus.\u00a0Preclinical work\u00a0in animals\u00a0suggests that hippocampal changes may\u00a0contribute to anhedonia. But do\u00a0hippocampal changes\u00a0linked to\u00a0childhood trauma make people\u00a0more\u00a0vulnerable to\u00a0developing\u00a0anhedonia?\u00a0New in\u00a0JNeurosci, a research team led by\u00a0Kathleen O’Brien at Temple University and\u00a0Vishnu Murty\u00a0at\u00a0the University of Oregon\u00a0sought\u00a0to answer this question.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A\u00a0large cohort of human participants\u00a0took\u00a0questionnaires\u00a0probing\u00a0childhood trauma and the ability to experience pleasure.\u00a0The researchers\u00a0then\u00a0used fMRI\u00a0to examine\u00a0hippocampus interactions with motivation-related brain\u00a0areas. Individuals with childhood trauma\u00a0and\u00a0disrupted\u00a0hippocampus pathways\u00a0experienced more\u00a0anhedonia than those with childhood trauma and no disruption to hippocampus pathways.\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to the researchers, this work\u00a0suggests that\u00a0childhood trauma interacts\u00a0with disrupted motivation-related\u00a0pathways\u00a0in the brain to\u00a0contribute to the onset of anhedonia.\u00a0Murty emphasizes that this work is among the first to link the hippocampus, a brain region typically associated with memory, to apathetic behavior in humans. The research team hopes to\u00a0identify\u00a0a target in\u00a0the hippocampus that can increase pleasure in people with childhood trauma\u00a0and to continue exploring the relationship between memory and anhedonia.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Source:<\/p>\n
Journal reference:<\/p>\n
O\u2019Brien, K. J., et al. (2026)\u00a0Functional integrity of mesolimbic-hippocampal circuits is associated with anhedonia in individuals with early life stress. JNeurosci. DOI:\u00a010.1523\/JNEUROSCI.0274-26.2026.\u00a0https:\/\/www.jneurosci.org\/content\/early\/2026\/08\/06\/JNEUROSCI.0274-26.2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Experiencing trauma in childhood can lead to a lack of motivation and less pleasure from rewards-or anhedonia-later in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[213066,84,103,13250,61,60,87,13251,89,13024],"class_list":["post-596300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-anhedonia","tag-brain","tag-health","tag-hippocampus","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-neuroscience","tag-preclinical","tag-research","tag-trauma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=596300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=596300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=596300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=596300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}