BACKGROUND: Although inflammatory activity is known to play a role in depression, no
work has examined whether experimentally induced systemic inflammation alters neural
activity that is associated with anhedonia, a key diagnostic symptom of depression. To
investigate this, we examined the effect of an experimental inflammatory challenge on the
neural correlates of anhedonia—namely, reduced ventral striatum (VS) activity to reward
cues. We also examined whether this altered neural activity related to inflammatory-induced …