Aging reduces motivation through decreased Bdnf expression in the ventral tegmental area

Authors

• Hanyue Cecilia Lei, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
• Kyle E Parker, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
• Chao-Cheng Kuo, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
• Carla M Yuede, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
• Jordan G McCall, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
• Shin-Ichiro Imai, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis

Journal

Molecular Psychiatry

Publication Date

3-1-2026

Volume

31

Issue

3

First Page

1398

Last Page

1408

Document Type

Open Access Publication

DOI

10.1038/s41380-025-03253-0

Rights and Permissions

Lei, H.C., Parker, K.E., Kuo, CC. et al. Aging reduces motivation through decreased Bdnf expression in the ventral tegmental area. Mol Psychiatry 31, 1398–1408 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-025-03253-0 This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Recommended Citation

Lei, Hanyue Cecilia; Parker, Kyle E; Kuo, Chao-Cheng; Yuede, Carla M; McCall, Jordan G; and Imai, Shin-Ichiro, "Aging reduces motivation through decreased Bdnf expression in the ventral tegmental area." Molecular Psychiatry. 31, 3. 1398 - 1408. (2026).
https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/oa_4/6621

Department

ICTS (Institute of Clinical and Translational Sciences)

Additional Links

Supplemental material is available for this article at publisher site.