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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)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Hartree on Sunday October 15 2017, @02:06AM (4 children)
There are a number of street drugs that are under investigation for treating resistant depression. Ketamine is the one farthest along in the studies. It has the advantage of being a widely used anesthetic worldwide so the paperwork and restrictions are easier for researchers to deal with.
On the other hand, MDMA, psilocybin and a number hallucinogens appear to have promise as treatments for various psychiatric disorders, but due to them being schedule 1 they are a major hassle for researchers to work with. We need a way that it can be less onerous in paperwork and restrictions to do work on these. We have researchers where I work that use cocaine to modulate dopamine levels in bees. That's the cocaine addled dancing bees that you may have read about as a puff piece news story a few years back. That the work of Dr. Gene Robinson in our entomology/genomic biology departments. I can guarantee he and his researchers aren't doing that just to get a toot. The paperwork is onerous.
(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.)
(Further aside: This is of great interest to me as I suffer from chronic depression and have taken an antidepressant for many years. Though mine is easily treated, many cases are much harder to treat. I have members of my close family also with depression. In one person, it's been difficult to control and resulted in a suicide attempt that caused self injury. Scary stuff. I'd like to have a better array of tools for the doctors to be able to treat this and other mental illnesses.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @03:12AM (2 children)
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)
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
I know.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 15 2017, @05:24AM
I worked for a company that makes an implantable neurostimulator, initially released for epilepsy - it also shows some promise for depression. It got the depression indication because an investor came along, installed himself as CEO and basically ramrodded the indication through the FDA as quickly as humanly possible (took years.)
I was there the day he "outed himself" in the cafeteria infront of all the employees - told about his family history of depression and suicide - and everybody already knew he was clearly manic-depressive himself. These are people for whom money is no problem whatsoever, and they're still killing themselves.
The device itself is hit-or-miss for depression, just like epilepsy, and last I knew (10 years ago now), it cost around $30K to get one put in - not covered by insurance for depression, though many insurers do cover it for epilepsy.