Exercise Facilitation of Adolescent Fear Extinction, Frontolimbic Circuitry, and Endocannabinoids
| Trial ID | NCT06297278 |
| Status | Recruiting |
| Condition | Adolescence |
| Intervention | Moderate Intensity Exercise |
Adolescent anxiety disorders represent a critical therapeutic gap, with conventional treatments showing limited efficacy in developing brains. This trial addresses a fundamental need by investigating whether acute exercise can enhance fear extinction through endocannabinoid modulation—potentially offering a novel, accessible intervention for youth anxiety.
This ongoing recruitment-phase trial examines whether moderate-intensity exercise can improve fear extinction learning in adolescents through enhanced frontolimbic brain activity and endocannabinoid signaling. The study focuses on adolescent participants and measures both neurobiological markers and behavioral outcomes related to fear regulation. Investigators are testing the hypothesis that exercise-induced endocannabinoid release can optimize the neural circuits responsible for extinguishing pathological fear responses.
“If positive, this trial could establish exercise as a precision medicine tool for adolescent anxiety treatment, leveraging the endocannabinoid system’s natural capacity for fear regulation. This represents exactly the kind of mechanism-based intervention we need—using endogenous cannabinoid pathways rather than exogenous compounds in developing brains.”
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This trial item was assembled from normalized source metadata and pipeline scoring.
