Papers of the Week

Anxiety and depression are frequently observed in patients suffering from trigeminal neuralgia (TN), but neural circuits and mechanisms underlying this association are poorly understood. Here, we identified a dedicated neural circuit from the ventral hippocampus (vHPC) to the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) that mediates TN-related anxiodepression. We found that TN caused an increase in excitatory synaptic transmission from vHPC neurons to mPFC inhibitory neurons marked by the expression of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH). Activation of CRH neurons subsequently led to feed-forward inhibition of layer V pyramidal neurons in the mPFC via activation of the CRH receptor 1 (CRHR1). Inhibition of the vHPC-mPFC circuit ameliorated TN-induced anxiodepression, whereas activating this pathway sufficiently produced anxiodepressive-like behaviors. Thus, our studies identified a neural pathway driving pain-related anxiodepression and a molecular target for treating pain-related psychiatric disorders.