Anxiety disorders affect 40 million Americans, making them the most common mental health condition in the country. Treatments have improved over decades, but they remain blunt instruments — SSRIs that alter serotonin across the entire brain, benzodiazepines that broadly suppress neural activity, therapy that works over months of sessions. A new discovery published in June 2026 by researchers at Spain's Institute for Neurosciences offers a glimpse at a more precise future: a specific, tiny circuit of neurons in the amygdala that can both cause anxiety and eliminate it — depending entirely on whether the circuit is in balance.
The research, led by Juan Lerma and his team at the Synaptic Physiology laboratory of the Institute for Neurosciences (a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council and Miguel Hernández University), was published this week in ScienceDaily and represents an evolution of the team's earlier iScience study. The team used genetically modified mice engineered to overexpress the Grik4 gene — which is linked to human neuropsychiatric conditions including treatment response to antidepressants — specifically in a small cluster of neurons in the basolateral amygdala.
