A hallucinogenic drug derived from magic .nmushrooms could be useful in treating depression, the first safety study of this approach has concluded.
Researchers from Imperial College London gave 12 people psilocybin, the active component in magic mushrooms. All had been clinically depressed for a significant amount of time on average 17.8 years. None of the patients had responded to stan-dard medications, such as selective sero-tonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), or had electroconvulsive therapy.
One week after receiving an oral dose of psilocybin, all patients experienced a marked improvement in their symptoms. Three months on, five patients were in com-plete remission.
"That is pretty remarkable in the context of currently available treatments," says Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuropsychophar-macologist at Imperial College London and first author of the latest study, which is pub-lished in The Lancet- Psychiatry.
The equivalent remission rate for SSRIs is around 20 percent.
The study's authors are not suggesting that psilocybin should be a treatment of last resort for depressed patients. "Our conclu-sion is more sober than that we are simply saying that this is doable," says Carhart-Harris. "We can give psilocybin to depressed patients, they can tolerate it, and it is safe. This gives us an initial impression of the effectiveness of the treatment."
Demonstrating the safety of psilocybin is no small task. Magic mushrooms are catego-rized as a Class A illegal drug in the United Kingdom — the most serious category, which also includes heroin and cocaine.
The ethics committee that granted approval for the trial was so concerned that trial volunteers could experience delayed onset psychotic symptoms that it requested a three-month follow-up on the subjects.
"The study result isn't the remarkable part — it's the fact that we did it at all." "This was unprecedented," says neuro-psy-cho-pharmacologist David Nutt at Imperial, who is senior author of the study.
Source: The Guardian News
No comments:
Post a Comment