Psychedelics – News and Features

MDMA (3,4-methyenedioxymethamphetamine), a Class A substance that is usually found in a tableted form, is a psychoactive drug which is structurally similar to methylamphetamine and acts as a central nervous system stimulant, producing mood enhancement, increased energy and other empathetic effects.

Research led by Charles Nichols, PhD, Associate Professor of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at the Louisiana State University (LSU) Health New Orleans School of Medicine, has found that a psychedelic drug, (R)-DOI, prevents the development of allergic asthma in a mouse model.

With a $7.8 million, five-year grant from the NIH researchers are utilizing accelerator mass spectrometry for cancer research.

A drug being studied as a fast-acting mood-lifter restored pleasure-seeking behavior independent of — and ahead of — its other antidepressant effects, in a National Institutes of Health trial.

An evolutionarily ancient and tiny part of the brain tracks expectations about nasty events, finds new research The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrates for the first time that the human habenula, half the size of a pea, tracks predictions about negative events, like painful electric shocks, suggesting a role in learning from bad experiences.

For critically ill patients arriving at the emergency department, the drug ketamine can safely provide analgesia, sedation and amnesia for rapid, life-saving intubation, despite decades-old studies that suggested it raised intracranial pressure.

New research shows that our brain displays a similar pattern of activity during dreams as it does during a mind-expanding drug trip. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms can profoundly alter the way we experience the world but little is known about what physically happens in the brain.

Fast-acting ketamine by-product – may be future therapy for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s There is new hope for people suffering from depression. Researchers have identified a compound, hydroxynorketamine (HNK), that may treat symptoms of depression just as effectively and rapidly as ketamine, without the unwanted side effects associated with the psychoactive drug, according to a study in the July issue of Anesthesiology, the official medical journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists® (ASA®).

When emotions are processed in a negatively biased manner in the brain, an individual is at risk to develop depression. Psilocybin, the bioactive component of the Mexican magic mushroom, seems to intervene positively in the emotion-processing mechanism.

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