More Research Demonstrating Promise Of Psychedelic Medicine
1. “PTSD Patients Can Feel Some Hope.”
For the New York Times, Rachel Nuwer reports on a new study, published in the prestigious science journal Nature Medicine, finding that “MDMA-assisted therapy seems to be effective in reducing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will consider the results “as part of an application for approval to market MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, when paired with talk therapy.”
Here’s how the study worked, via NYT:
“The 104 participants in the new study had been diagnosed with moderate to severe PTSD and had lived with the condition for an average of 16 years. They included victims of childhood trauma, combat veterans, survivors of sexual assault and others. Many had a history of suicidal thoughts and also suffered from comorbidities such as depression and alcohol use disorder.
Each participant worked with a two-person therapy team and received three 90-minute preparatory, talk therapy sessions followed by three treatment cycles, spaced one month apart. Each consisted of an eight-hour experimental session in which the participant took either MDMA or a placebo paired with talk therapy, and then attended three 90-minute talk therapy sessions.”
Here’s what researchers found, via Nature Medicine:
“[For] participants with moderate to severe PTSD, MDMA significantly improved PTSD symptoms and functional impairment compared to placebo with therapy over 18 weeks. Notably, 86.5% participants treated with MDMA achieved a clinically meaningful benefit, and 71.2% participants no longer met criteria for PTSD by study end. In a historic first, to our knowledge, for psychedelic treatment studies, participants who identified as ethnically or racially diverse encompassed approximately half of the study sample… Given the diverse population and degree of participant complexity, the replication of efficacy is particularly notable.”
Here’s why these findings have researchers feeling hopeful:
Conventional PTSD Treatment Leaves Millions Without Relief. “PTSD affects about 5 percent of the adult population of the United States each year”—that’s almost 13 million people—“but conventional therapies and medications only help, at best, around 50 percent of patients,” Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and head of the American Psychedelic Practitioners Association, explained to the New York Times. “My clinical experience is that too many men and women have lost hope with conventional treatments and therapies and feel the only ‘out’ for them is committing suicide—MDMA-assisted therapy offers a new, potentially life-saving option when done thoughtfully and professionally,” Dr. Xenakis said.
The First Novel Treatment For PTSD In Decades. Berra Yazar-Klosinski, the senior author of the study, explained to the newspaper how groundbreaking this finding—and its submission to the FDA—really is: “If approved, ‘MDMA-assisted therapy would be the first novel treatment for PTSD in over two decades…PTSD patients can feel some hope.”
2. Faster Healing In The Brain.
“The human brain can change—but usually only slowly and with great effort,” Edmund Higgins, Professor of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, writes in The Conversation. However, “psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy appears to tap into [a] natural neural mechanism” that allows for rapid, positive transformations [to] happen.”
Higgins explains that “new skills, memories, and attitudes are encoded in the brain” when new connections between neurons are formed “sort of like branches of trees growing toward each other.” Psychedelics appear to both dramatically speed up the process and help those changes to stick. Higgins cites two new research studies that illustrate his point:
“A lab at Yale recently documented rapid spine formation in the frontal cortex of mice after one dose of psilocybin. Researchers found that mice given [psilocybin] had about a 10 percent increase in spine formation. These changes had occurred when examined one day after treatment and endured for over a month.”
“DMT, the active chemical in the plant-based psychedelic ayahuasca, stimulates a receptor cell type called 5-HT2A [which] also appears to mediate the hyperplastic states when a brain is changing quickly.”
3. Two More Promising Studies In The Pipeline
University of Michigan Researchers Are “Examining The Effects Of Psilocybin [On] Symptoms Of Fibromyalgia.” For Bridge Michigan, Robin Erb reports on a new study at the Michigan Psychedelic Center at U.M. that “will research whether oral psilocybin can relieve symptoms among people with the complex chronic pain disorder, fibromyalgia. [The research will examine whether the psychedelic-assisted therapy] enables them to better understand and control symptoms including pain, stiffness, fatigue, anxiety and depression.”
Researchers Examining Whether Repeated Low-Dose Psilocybin Treatments “Increase Resilience To Stress, Lower Compulsive Actions.” A recent study published in Molecular Psychology from researchers at the University of Denmark found that “repeated low doses of psilocybin increased resilience to stress, [reduced] compulsive behaviors…[and] increased the number of connections to the thalamus region of the brain” in rats. Buoyed by these findings, researchers will next study whether these promising findings translate to “therapeutic treatment in humans."
