Findings from a new study give insight into how psychedelic substances may relieve symptoms of mental health conditions.
A study carried out by Virginia Tech and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) researchers in mice has demonstrated that psychedelic substances like psilocybin, mescaline and LSD may relieve symptoms of addiction, anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The findings, which have been published in Cell Reports, showed that the substances worked faster and lasted longer than current medications, coupled with fewer side effects, from just one dose.
The effects of psychedelics on brain tissues
Fred W. Bull Professor of Chemical Engineering in the College of Engineering, Chang Lu, is helping his VCU collaborators study the epigenomic effects of psychedelics using a genomic analysis process his lab developed in 2015. The process allows researchers to use very small samples of tissue, down to hundreds to thousands of cells, and draw meaningful conclusions from them. This approach enables studies using just a small quantity of material from a specific region of a mouse brain – and looking at the effects of psychedelics on brain tissues is especially important.
Researchers can do human clinical trials with the substances, taking blood and urine samples and observing behaviors, Lu said: “But the thing is, the behavioural data will tell you the result, but it doesn’t tell you why it works in a certain way.”
Looking at molecular changes in animal models allows scientists to understand the biological processes at work, and, while the brains of mice are very different from human brains, Lu said there are enough similarities to make valid comparisons between the two.
Epigenomic variations
VCU pharmacologist Javier González-Maeso, whose career has focused on studying psychedelics, highlights that psychedelics have shown promise in alleviating major depression and anxiety disorders.
“They induce profound effects in perception, but I was interested in how these drugs actually induce behavioural effects in mice.”
To explore the genomic basis of those effects, he teamed up with Lu. González-Maeso’s team used 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine, or DOI, a drug similar to LSD, administering it to mice that had been trained to fear certain triggers, then analysed brain samples for changes in the epigenome and the gene expression.
The team discovered that the epigenomic variations were longer-lasting than the changes in gene expression, thus more likely to link with the long-term effects of a psychedelic. After one dose of DOI, the mice that had reacted to fear triggers no longer responded to them with anxious behaviours.
Lu noted that the mouse brains also showed effects, even after the substance was no longer detectable in the tissues.
“My older brother has had schizophrenia for the last 30 years, basically. So I’ve always been intrigued by mental health,” Lu said. “And then once I found that our approach can be applied to look at processes like that — that’s why I decided to do research in the field of brain neuroscience.”
González-Maeso said research on psychedelics is still in its early stages, and that there is much work to be done before treatments derived from them could be widely available.
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