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Study Suggests Psilocybin "Resets" the Brains of Depressed People

posted by martyb on Sunday October 15 2017, @12:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the things-are-looking-up dept.

takyon writes:

An fMRI study has found evidence of a reduction in depressive symptoms after treatment with psilocybin:

A hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms can "reset" the brains of people with untreatable depression, raising hopes of a future treatment, scans suggest.

The small study gave 19 patients a single dose of the psychedelic ingredient psilocybin. Half of patients ceased to be depressed and experienced changes in their brain activity that lasted about five weeks.

However, the team at Imperial College London says people should not self-medicate.

There has been a series of small studies suggesting psilocybin could have a role in depression by acting as a "lubricant for the mind" that allows people to escape a cycle of depressive symptoms. But the precise impact it might be having on brain activity was not known.

Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression: fMRI-measured brain mechanisms (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-13282-7) (DX)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @03:12AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @03:12AM (#582490)

    (Aside: There's very good reason for his work on the effect of cocaine on the waggle dance of bees. Currently in order to determine levels of neurotransmitters in bee brains which are used for a lot of neurological studies as a model organism you have to kill the bee, do chemical extractions and run it through a mass spec or other analytical system. It's expensive and problematic. Bee's dancing is easily observable and you can just have a grad student observe them (or a machine vision system if you want to get fancy). If you can get rough correlations between the observed dancing and neurotransmitter levels, or other measurable quantity in the bee's brain you can make research a lot easier.)

    Cool. I didn't realize scientists have figured out this out. Learning about something does not require measuring it carefully and correctly, apparently measuring something roughly correlated to it is enough. Go "science".

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @10:10AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @10:10AM (#582587)

    These are called biomarkers or surrogate markers when they are sufficiently reliable. The big one would be a blood draw to test all sorts of shit in your organs rather than extracting them and grinding them up.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @07:43PM (#582735)

      I know.