Researchers publish some of the first data in humans indicating that psilocybin has potential for patients with neurodegenerative diseases.
Cannabis-Pic/Getty Images
hide caption
Cannabis-Pic/Getty Images
Efforts to understand how classic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD cause powerful changes in consciousness tend to focus on what’s going on inside our heads.
Indeed, these compounds bind tightly to serotonin receptors that densely populate certain structures in the brain, and a growing number of studies demonstrate that they can exert lasting changes on the mental health and well-being of people suffering from various psychiatric problems.
More and more researchers have begun to study how these drugs cause other physiological changes, since many cells and tissues beyond the brain have these same receptors, called 5-HT2A.
Now, new research offers some of the first evidence in humans that psychedelics may also have potential to treat diseases characterized by inflammation and immune dysregulation throughout the body.
The data, published Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry, draws on a small group of Parkinson’s patients, but reflects what has been observed in laboratory studies with animal and cell models for years. For some illnesses, psychedelics appear to fight inflammation and even help restore stressed mitochondria, the energy-producing factories of cells.
The team from the University of California, San Francisco, who conducted the study, used blood tests to measure five different signaling molecules involved in inflammation in participants, before and after two psilocybin sessions.
Participants had significantly lower levels of inflammation after treatments compared to baseline, and these changes persisted a month after their last dose of psilocybin. The researchers also monitored a blood marker of mitochondrial stress. Here too, substantial improvements were seen immediately after participants received psilocybin, but not during longer-term follow-up.
“This gives us an initial biological signal to study,” says Dr. Ellen Bradley, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCSF who helped lead the analysis.
The results were based on 12 participants in a pilot study to evaluate the feasibility and safety of administering psilocybin to people with Parkinson’s disease. Patients with neurodegenerative diseases are generally excluded from psychedelic and mental health trials due to safety concerns.
The original study, published last year, allayed researchers’ concerns about the risks. Bradley says they found a “really promising safety profile” and that “the symptoms even seemed to improve a little.”
The researchers point out that the study has limitations: They did not have a control group and the participants knew they were receiving the drug. Data about what was happening in their blood therefore needs to be confirmed with follow-up studies before making definitive claims, says Aoife O’Donovan, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCSF and co-author of the paper.
Still, O’Donovan says the results reflect “objective markers” that have changed over time and that give them the confidence to pursue this line of research.
Parkinson’s disease is characterized by dysregulated inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction. This data, Bradley notes, could help explain why participants seemed to benefit from the drugs during the trial.
Beyond that, the findings suggest that psychedelics could help treat other diseases characterized by problems with inflammation, says D. Parker Kelley, a research scientist in the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Group at Columbia University, who was one of the first authors of the paper with Bradley.
“This is a potential starting point for a lot of additional research in this area,” he says, “that could apply not only to Parkinson’s disease, but also to neuropsychiatric disorders like depression and anxiety, and even cardio-metabolic and inflammatory disorders.”
While previous studies have looked at biomarkers of inflammation after psilocybin, these typically included healthy volunteers — not people with an actual disease, says Charles Nichols, professor of pharmacology, biochemistry and experimental therapeutics at the LSU Health Sciences Center in New Orleans.
“I think it’s really exciting,” says Nichols, who didn’t work on the study, but whose lab discovered about 15 years ago that certain psychedelics could have powerful anti-inflammatory effects.
This idea came from studying cell cultures grown in the laboratory that simulated inflammation of blood vessels and hardening of the arteries, also known as atherosclerosis.
In this experiment, they found that a psychedelic acting on 5-H2TA receptors worked as a “potent anti-inflammatory,” even at doses much lower than those that would induce a psychoactive trip, he says.
Since then, Nichols’ group has conducted numerous experiments in animal models of diseases, including asthma, arthritis, and cardiovascular disease, but it needed to be tested whether these protective effects hold up in humans.
According to him, this new study carried out on patients with Parkinson’s disease constitutes proof of principle.
“We can’t draw much from these conclusions,” he says. “But I think it validates a lot of the pharmacology that we’ve done over the last 15 years on anti-inflammatories, mitochondrial protectors…
Gn Health
