Metabolic disturbances are highly prevalent across major psychiatric disorders. Increasingly, these abnormalities are recognized not merely as comorbidities but as central components of disease pathophysiology, influencing illness onset, symptom expression, cognitive dysfunction, treatment response, and long-term outcomes. Conversely, psychiatric disorders may accelerate metabolic deterioration through stress-related pathways, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis dysregulation, sleep disturbances, inflammatory activation, and exposure to psychotropic medications. This bidirectional relationship has given rise to the rapidly evolving field of Metabolic Psychiatry, which integrates concepts from psychiatry, neuroscience, endocrinology, immunology, metabolism, and systems biology.
Recent advances have transformed our ability to characterize biologically meaningful patient subgroups and uncover mechanistic pathways linking metabolic dysfunction to mental illness. At the same time, novel therapeutic strategies are opening new opportunities for prevention and treatment. This article collection aims to highlight cutting-edge discoveries that advance our understanding of the metabolic underpinnings of psychiatric disorders and accelerate the translation of mechanistic insights into precision diagnostics and therapeutics.
We welcome contributions spanning basic, translational, and clinical research that explore the complex interactions between metabolism and brain function across the lifespan. The topics of interest are:
- Metabolic Psychiatry: conceptual frameworks and emerging paradigms
- Metabolomic, lipidomic, proteomic, and multi-omics biomarkers
- Precision psychiatry and biomarker-guided treatment strategies
- Obesity, adiposity, and metabolic phenotypes in psychiatric disorders
- Insulin resistance, glucose metabolism, and metabolic regulation of brain function
- Mitochondrial dysfunction, bioenergetics, and oxidative stress
- Immunometabolism, neuroinflammation, and immune-metabolic interactions
- Gut-brain axis, microbial metabolites, and psychometabolic health
- Neuroendocrine regulation, appetite pathways, and energy homeostasis
- Women's mental health, reproductive transitions, and metabolic vulnerability
- Metabolic dysfunction across mood, psychotic, anxiety, neurodevelopmental, and neurodegenerative disorders
- Metabolic consequences of psychotropic medications
- Obesity treatment and psychiatric outcomes
- GLP-1 receptor agonists, dual incretin therapies, and other emerging metabolic therapeutics
- Lifestyle medicine, exercise, precision nutrition, therapeutic diets, and weight-management interventions
- Metabolic predictors of treatment response, resistance, relapse, and disease progression
- Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computational approaches for biomarker discovery and patient stratification
- Translational and clinical studies evaluating metabolically targeted interventions
We particularly encourage submissions that bridge mechanistic, translational, and clinical research, as well as systematic reviews that synthesize current evidence and identify future directions for the field.
Please select the option “Call for Papers: Metabolic Psychiatry in the Era of Precision Medicine” when submitting your manuscript and mention this Call for Papers in your cover letter.
Article publication is subject to rigorous peer review in line with the journal's editorial policies. Please refer to our author guidelines for further details about the publication conditions.
As a hybrid journal, Neuropsychobiology supports Open Access publications. Corresponding authors can publish Open Access articles at no or reduced cost if they are associated with or employed by one of these universities/institutions.