By Cassandra Willyard Megan Hodge’s first bout of intense pain arrived when she was in her mid-20s. Hodge and her husband were getting ready to visit family for Thanksgiving. Though Hodge had been dealing with a variety of chronic health issues, her workout had gone well that morning and she finally felt like she was getting a handle on her health. Hodge began packing. As she reached into her closet to grab a sweater, her back gave out. The pain was excruciating, so intense that she felt light-headed and thought she might vomit. As the years passed, Hodge had more frequent and more severe bouts of back pain. Any small movement could be a trigger — grabbing a towel from the linen closet, picking up a toy off the floor, sneezing. In 2021, Hodge experienced a particularly bad flare-up. None of the strategies she had previously used to help her manage seemed to be working. She was afraid to make any movement. She felt hopeless. “I just could not regain footing, metaphorically and physically,” she says. “I truly felt frozen in my chronic pain and chronic health journey.” Hodge is far from alone. In the United States, chronic pain affects tens of millions of people — about 1 in 5 adults and nearly 1 in 3 people ages 65 and older. “The amount of suffering from arthritis and aging that I’ve seen in my pain clinic, it’s overwhelming to me as a pain doctor,” says Antje Barreveld, an anesthesiologist at Mass General Brigham’s Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts. What’s more, the mainstay therapy for severe acute and chronic pain — prescription opioids — has helped fuel an epidemic that kills tens of thousands of people each year. “We have to have some better alternatives,” she says. So researchers have doubled down in their quest to find new pain treatments that aren’t as addictive as opioids. “The pain field has really made very rapid and tremendous progress in the last decade,” says D.P. Mohapatra, a former pain scientist who now oversees research at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29470 - Posted: 09.07.2024

By Christina Jewett The number of teenagers who reported using e-cigarettes in 2024 has tumbled from a worrisome peak reached five years ago, raising hopes among public health officials for a sustained reversal in vaping trends among adolescents. In an annual survey conducted from January through May in schools across the nation, fewer than 8 percent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the past month, the lowest level in a decade. That’s far lower than the apex, in 2019, when more than 27 percent of high school students who took the survey reported that they vaped — and an estimated 500,000 fewer adolescents than last year. The data is from the National Youth Tobacco Survey, a questionnaire filled out by thousands of middle and high school students that is administered each year by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overall, it found that just under 6 percent of middle and high school students reported vaping in the last month, down from nearly 8 percent among those surveyed last year. Use among high school students largely accounted for this year’s decline; middle school use stayed fairly steady with 3.5 percent reporting they had vaped compared to 4.6 percent the year before. “I want to be unequivocally clear that this continued decline in e-cigarette use among our nation’s youth is a monumental public health win,” Brian King, the director of the F.D.A.’s tobacco division, said during a news briefing on Wednesday. Public health experts said several factors may have contributed to the decline in teenage vaping, including city and state flavored tobacco bans, a blitz of enforcement against sellers of flavored vapes and three public messaging campaigns aimed at young people about the dangers of vaping. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29467 - Posted: 09.07.2024

By Jan Hoffman The message emblazoned on a walkway window at the airport in Burlington, Vt., is a startling departure from the usual tourism posters and welcome banners: “Addiction is not a choice. It’s a disease that can happen to anyone.” The statement is part of a public service campaign in yet another community assailed by drug use, intended to reduce stigma and encourage treatment. For decades, medical science has classified addiction as a chronic brain disease, but the concept has always been something of a hard sell to a skeptical public. That is because, unlike diseases such as Alzheimer’s or bone cancer or Covid, personal choice does play a role, both in starting and ending drug use. The idea that those who use drugs are themselves at fault has recently been gaining fresh traction, driving efforts to toughen criminal penalties for drug possession and to cut funding for syringe-exchange programs. But now, even some in the treatment and scientific communities have been rethinking the label of chronic brain disease. In July, behavior researchers published a critique of the classification, which they said could be counterproductive for patients and families. “I don’t think it helps to tell people they are chronically diseased and therefore incapable of change. Then what hope do we have?” said Kirsten E. Smith, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a co-author of the paper, published in the journal Psychopharmacology. “The brain is highly dynamic, as is our environment.” The recent scientific criticisms are driven by an ominous urgency: Despite addiction’s longstanding classification as a disease, the deadly public health disaster has only worsened. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29461 - Posted: 09.04.2024

By Steve Paulson Oliver Sacks wasn’t always the beloved neurologist we remember today, sleuthing around the backwaters of the mind in search of mysterious mental disorders. For a few years in the 1960s, he was a committed psychonaut, often spending entire weekends blitzed out of his mind on weed, LSD, morning glory seeds, or mescaline. Once, after injecting himself with a large dose of morphine, he found himself hovering over an enormous battlefield, watching the armies of England and France drawn up for battle, and then realized he was witnessing the 1415 Battle of Agincourt. “I completely lost the sense that I was lying on my bed stoned,” he told me in 2012, a few years before he died. “I felt like a historian, seeing Agincourt from a celestial viewpoint. This was not ordinary imagination. It was absolutely real.” The vision seemed to last only a few minutes, but later, he discovered he’d been tripping for 13 hours. These early experiences with hallucinogens gave Sacks an appreciation for the strange turns the mind can take. He had a craving for direct experience of the numinous, but he believed his visions were nothing more than hallucinations. “At the physiological level, everything is electricity and chemistry, but it was a wonderful feeling,” he said. When I asked if he ever thought he’d crossed over into some transpersonal dimension of reality, he said, “I’m an old Jewish atheist. I have no belief in heaven or anything supernatural or paranormal, but there’s a mystical feeling of oneness and of beauty, which is not explicitly religious, but goes far beyond the aesthetic.” I’ve often thought about this conversation as I’ve watched today’s psychedelic renaissance. Clinical trials with psychedelic-assisted therapy show great promise for treating depression, addiction, and PTSD, and a handful of leading universities have recently created their own heavily endowed psychedelic centers. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Consciousness
Link ID: 29453 - Posted: 08.28.2024

By Rachel Nuwer One person felt a sensation of “slowly floating into the air” as images flashed around. Another recalled “the most profound sense of love and peace,” unlike anything experienced before. Consciousness became a “foreign entity” to another whose “whole sense of reality disappeared.” These were some of the firsthand accounts shared in a small survey of people who belonged to an unusual cohort: They had all undergone a near-death experience and tried psychedelic drugs. The survey participants described their near-death and psychedelic experiences as being distinct, yet they also reported significant overlap. In a paper published on Thursday, researchers used these accounts to provide a comparison of the two phenomena. “For the first time, we have a quantitative study with personal testimony from people who have had both of these experiences,” said Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium and an author of the findings, which were published in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness. “Now we can say for sure that psychedelics can be a kind of window through which people can enter a rich, subjective state resembling a near-death experience.” Near-death experiences are surprisingly common — an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the general population has reported having one. For decades, scientists largely dismissed the fantastical stories of people who returned from the brink of death. But some researchers have started to take these accounts seriously. “In recent times, the science of consciousness has become interested in nonordinary states,” said Christopher Timmermann, a research fellow at the Center for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London and an author of the article. “To get a comprehensive account of what it means to be a human being requires incorporating these experiences.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29450 - Posted: 08.22.2024

By Marla Broadfoot When doctors ask Sara Gehrig to describe her pain, she often says it is indescribable. Stabbing, burning, aching—those words frequently fail to depict sensations that have persisted for so long they are now a part of her, like her bones and skin. “My pain is like an extra limb that comes along with me every day.” Gehrig, a former yoga instructor and personal trainer who lives in Wisconsin, is 44 years old. At the age of 17 she discovered she had spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal cord that puts pressure on the nerves there. She experienced bursts of excruciating pain in her back and buttocks and running down her legs. That pain has spread over the years, despite attempts to fend it off with physical therapy, anti-inflammatory injections and multiple surgeries. Over-the-counter medications such as ibuprofen (Advil) provide little relief. And she is allergic to the most potent painkillers—prescription opioids—which can induce violent vomiting. Today her agony typically hovers at a 7 out of 10 on the standard numerical scale used to rate pain, where 0 is no pain and 10 is the most severe imaginable. Occasionally her pain flares to a 9 or 10. At one point, before her doctor convinced her to take antidepressants, Gehrig struggled with thoughts of suicide. “For many with chronic pain, it’s always in their back pocket,” she says. “It’s not that we want to die. We want the pain to go away.” Gehrig says she would be willing to try another type of painkiller, but only if she knew it was safe. She keeps up with the latest research, so she was interested to hear earlier this year that Vertex Pharmaceuticals was testing a new drug that works differently than opioids and other pain medications. That drug, a pill called VX-548, blocks pain signals before they can reach the brain. It gums up sodium channels in peripheral nerve cells, and obstructed channels make it hard for those cells to transmit pain sensations. Because the drug acts only on the peripheral nerves, it does not carry the potential for addiction associated with opioids—oxycodone (OxyContin) and similar drugs exert their effects on the brain and spinal cord and thus can trigger the brain’s reward centers and an addiction cycle.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29445 - Posted: 08.21.2024

By Paula Span Mary Peart, 67, a retired nurse in Manchester-by-the-Sea, Mass., began taking gabapentin a year and a half ago to reduce the pain and fatigue of fibromyalgia. The drug helps her climb stairs, walk her dog and take art lessons, she said. With it, “I have a life,” she said. “If I forget to take a dose, my pain comes right back.” Jane Dausch has a neurological condition called transverse myelitis and uses gabapentin as needed when her legs and feet ache. “It seems to be effective at calming down nerve pain,” said Ms. Dausch, 67, a retired physical therapist in North Kingstown, R.I. Amy Thomas, who owns three bookstores in the San Francisco Bay Area, takes gabapentin for rheumatoid arthritis. Along with yoga and physical therapy, “it’s probably contributing to it being easier for me to move around,” Ms. Thomas, 67, said. All three are taking the non-opioid pain drug for off-label uses. The only conditions for which gabapentin has been approved for adult use by the Food and Drug Administration are epileptic seizures, in 1993, and postherpetic neuralgia, the nerve pain that can linger after a bout of shingles, in 2002. But that has not stopped patients and health care providers from turning to gabapentin (whose brand names include Neurontin) for a startling array of other conditions, including sciatica, neuropathy from diabetes, lower back pain and post-surgery pain. Also: Agitation from dementia. Insomnia. Migraines. Itching. Bipolar disorder. Alcohol dependence. Evidence of effectiveness for these conditions is all over the map. The drug appears to provide relief for some patients with diabetic neuropathy but not with some other kinds of neuropathic pain. Several small studies indicate that gabapentin can reduce the itching associated with kidney failure. But the data for its effectiveness against low back pain or a number of psychiatric disorders are limited and show no meaningful impact. “It’s crazy how many indications it’s used for,” said Dr. Michael Steinman, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, and a co-director of the U.S. Deprescribing Research Network. “It’s become a we-don’t-know-what-else-to-do drug.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29438 - Posted: 08.19.2024

By Sara Reardon Last week’s decision by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reject MDMA, also known as ecstasy, as a psychiatric treatment surprised many researchers. Lykos Therapeutics, the company that has been testing MDMA, plans to ask the FDA to reconsider the decision, but scientists are now wondering what the agency’s ruling will mean for other potential psychedelic therapies. In a press release posted on 9 August, Lykos, which is based in San Jose, California, said that the FDA had sent a letter requesting that the company undertake another large-scale trial of the drug in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and resubmit its application. “The FDA request for another study is deeply disappointing,” Lykos chief executive Amy Emerson said in the press release, adding that the company plans to work with the agency to “resolve scientific disagreements”. Conducting another study “would take several years”, she said, adding that Lykos has already addressed many of the FDA’s concerns. In an e-mail to Nature, Lykos declined to provide the complete letter detailing the agency’s specific concerns and directed the news team instead to its press release. Experts say that without access to the letter, it’s hard to determine why the FDA reached the decision it did. “We really are going off incomplete information,” says Mason Marks, who studies drug policy at Florida State University in Tallahassee, adding that he was “a little surprised” by the agency’s decision. Trial concerns But Marks points out that the FDA typically follows the advice of its independent advisory committees — and the one that evaluated MDMA in June overwhelmingly voted against approving the drug, citing problems with clinical trial design that the advisers felt made it difficult to determine the drug’s safety and efficacy. One concern was about the difficulty of conducting a true placebo-controlled study with a hallucinogen: around 90% of the participants in Lykos’s trials guessed correctly whether they had received the drug or a placebo, and the expectation that MDMA should have an effect might have coloured their perception of whether it treated their symptoms. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29433 - Posted: 08.15.2024

By Andrew Jacobs The journal Psychopharmacology has retracted three papers about MDMA-assisted therapy based on what the publication said was unethical conduct at one of the study sites where the research took place. Several of the papers’ authors are affiliated with Lykos Therapeutics, the drug company whose application for MDMA-assisted therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder was rejected last week by the Food and Drug Administration. The company said the research in the retracted papers was not part of its application to the F.D.A. In declining to approve Lykos’s application, the agency cited concerns about missing data and problems with the way the company’s study was designed, according to a statement released by Lykos on Friday. The F.D.A. has asked Lykos to conduct an additional clinical trial of its MDMA-assisted therapy, which would have been the first psychedelic medicine to win approval by federal regulators. Lykos has said it would appeal the decision. The journal retraction was first reported by Stat, the health and medical news website. On Sunday, Lykos said that it disagreed with Psychopharmacology’s decision and that it would file an official complaint with the Committee on Publication Ethics, a nonprofit that sets guidelines for academic publications. “The articles remain scientifically sound and present important contributions to the study of potential treatments for PTSD,” the company said in the statement. The incident cited by Psychopharmacology has been well documented. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29431 - Posted: 08.13.2024

By Roni Caryn Rabin Even light drinking was associated with an increase in cancer deaths among older adults in Britain, researchers reported on Monday in a large study. But the risk was accentuated primarily in those who had existing health problems or who lived in low-income areas. The study, which tracked 135,103 adults aged 60 and older for 12 years, also punctures the long-held belief that light or moderate alcohol consumption is good for the heart. The researchers found no reduction in heart disease deaths among light or moderate drinkers, regardless of this health or socioeconomic status, when compared with occasional drinkers. The study defined light drinking as a mean alcohol intake of up to 20 grams a day for men and up to 10 grams daily for women. (In the United States, a standard drink is 14 grams of alcohol.) “We did not find evidence of a beneficial association between low drinking and mortality,” said Dr. Rosario Ortolá, an assistant professor of preventive medicine and public health at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the lead author of the paper, which was published in JAMA Network Open. On the other hand, she added, alcohol probably raises the risk of cancer “from the first drop.” The findings add to a mounting body of evidence that is shifting the paradigm in alcohol research. Scientists are turning to new methodologies to analyze the risks and benefits of alcohol consumption in an attempt to correct what some believe were serious flaws in earlier research, which appeared to show that there were benefits to drinking. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29428 - Posted: 08.13.2024

Ross Ellenhorn and Dimitri Mugiani Earlier this month, an advisory panel rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, possibly dooming US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the drug commonly called ecstasy. In a public meeting alongside FDA staff, panel members said that the research neither adequately accounted for abuse risks nor proved the drug’s efficacy in combination with psychotherapy. This decision dealt a major blow to Lykos Therapeutics, the for-profit public benefit corporation of the non-profit Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (Maps), which sponsored the trials. More broadly, the rejection has been described as a drastic setback for the psychedelic movement as a whole. For several years now, it seemed that greater acceptance and new legal spaces for psychedelics were a certainty. Then, scientists appeared at the FDA hearing and everything went dark. As practitioners and leaders in the realm of human transformation, and in creating and running organizations that serve individuals experiencing complex psychiatric symptoms, we believe in psychedelics as a force for good. Yet, to us, this FDA decision is the natural and expected outcome of a basic and fatal conceptual error that our brothers and sisters in the movement have adopted. By joining larger trends within the behavioral health milieu that focus on the elimination of distinct symptoms by drugs and by expert-driven techniques, today’s psychedelic movement is teetering on the edge of becoming unpsychedelic. What do we mean by this? Psychedelics free our minds to novelty, liberating us from habitual patterns. The common term for this property is “brain plasticity”, and it may be the core reason these substances can also affect areas of psychological suffering related to habits of the mind – those that experienced psychiatrists label as depression, anxiety, addiction and, yes, PTSD. Psychedelics are pro-imagination, pro-creativity, pro-innovation – qualities that research shows are at the very root of personal growth. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29424 - Posted: 08.11.2024

Jake Rogers Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2024)Cite this article To better understand the therapeutic potential of the psychedelic drug psilocybin, we need a fuller understanding of its short-term and long-term effects on the human brain. In this study, Siegel et al. reveal individual-specific psilocybin-induced acute and persistent brain network changes in neurotypical young adults. The authors used longitudinal precision functional mapping — involving ~18 sessions of fMRI per individual — to capture individual-specific functional brain networks. Through this approach, acute (during) and persistent (between or after) intervention-induced changes to individual-specific network organization could be detected in young adult participants who received either high-dose psilocybin or dose-matched methylphenidate (a non-psychedelic stimulant chosen as an active control for psilocybin-induced cardiovascular and arousal effects) and who then, 1–2 weeks later, received the compound not administered first. Acutely, psilocybin caused not only widespread cortical functional connectivity (FC) changes (most prominently in association areas), but also disruption in subcortical regions connected with the default mode network (DMN), including the thalamus, basal ganglia, cerebellum and hippocampus. Furthermore, FC changes correlated with the intensity of the subjective experience documented using the 30-item mystical experience questionnaire (MEQ30). Several participants also received a second high dose of psilocybin and repeated an acute fMRI session six months later. Despite it being entirely plausible in a second acute session that individuals might experience the same effect, this repeated session revealed that individuals had substantially reduced or increased MEQ30 scores compared to their first acute session, and that the degree of the widespread brain changes and intensity of subjective experience correlated across and within individuals. By contrast, acute methylphenidate was associated with substantially less whole-brain FC disruption and most FC changes localized to sensorimotor systems. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29415 - Posted: 08.02.2024

By Tina Hesman Saey A mind-bending parasite may one day deliver drugs to the brain. Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled parasite that famously makes mice lose their fear of cats, but also can cause deadly foodborne illnesses (SN: 1/14/20). Now, researchers have engineered the parasite to deliver large therapeutic proteins to the brains of mice and into human brain cells grown in lab dishes, an international team of scientists reports July 29 in Nature Microbiology. Such proteins and the genes that produce them are often too big for viruses — the most common courier for gene therapy — to carry (SN: 10/20/23). If the parasite can be made safe for human use, the technique may eventually help treat a variety of neurological conditions. While critics doubt that the parasitic villain can ever be turned into a helpful hero, some researchers are intrigued by the idea. Microbes such as bacteria and parasites are usually viewed as bad guys, says Sara Molinari, a bacterial synthetic biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved with the work. But microbes have evolved “pretty sophisticated relationships with our bodies,” she says. “The idea that we can leverage this relationship to instruct them to do good things for us is actually groundbreaking.” Current methods of delivering therapies to the brain often produce unpredictable results or have a hard time penetrating the protective shield known as the blood-brain barrier, says Shahar Bracha, a bioengineer and neuroscientist at MIT (SN: 5/2/23). © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29414 - Posted: 07.31.2024

By Andrew Jacobs July 17, 2024 If you had to come up with a groovy visualization of the human brain on psychedelic drugs, it might look something like this. The image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner. The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain. The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders. “Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.” The study included seven healthy adults who were given either a single dose of psilocybin or a placebo in the form of methylphenidate, the generic version of the amphetamine Ritalin. Each participant underwent a total of 18 brain scans, taken before, during and after the initial dosing. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29398 - Posted: 07.18.2024

By Zachary Siegel Why do people use drugs? It’s one of those neglected questions with answers right in front of our noses. We just refuse to look. Getting high—and overdosing—is after all, as American as apple pie. Over 46 million people in the U.S. have an alcohol- or drug-use disorder. Everyone knows someone who died, or who lost a son or daughter, mother or father, to a drug overdose, one of the 100,000-plus now yearly recorded nationwide. Lost in today’s raging debate over drug policy and how to curb this spiraling mortality is the deep malaise that lies at the root of substance use in America. We are stuck on a loop, veering from “drug war” to legalization to backlash against legalization, without a record of improving lives and setting people on a successful path of recovery. And that’s because we are frankly unwilling to fix the economic cruelty that drives and keep people locked in dangerous drug use. In a 2022 photographic-ethnography published in the journal Criminology, investigators did the obvious thing and asked people using meth in rural Alabama how they made sense of their tumultuous lives. Rather than gathering post-hoc justifications for using meth, the study aimed to hear people who use drugs tell their own stories. The results painted a remarkably vivid portrait of poverty and drug use in 21st-century rural America. Across small towns in the northern tier of Alabama, a state with the sixth lowest median household income and seventh highest poverty rate, the researchers observed lives caught in repetitive and destructive patterns. Women felt trapped in relationships that were volatile and often violent. They would flee but have nowhere to go. People felt a pervasive sense that they lacked freedom and agency to improve their circumstances. If you feel boxed in by the absence of opportunity and mobility, then daily meth use, adding a synthetic buzz and thrill to otherwise boring or dreadful moments, isn’t such a stretch. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29384 - Posted: 07.09.2024

By Susan Dominus About a year ago, a friend of mine started evading my invitations to grab a drink. It was only when we caught up for a walk that she explained she wasn’t putting me off for any personal reason — it was just that she had stopped drinking. She wasn’t a heavy drinker — she had a glass of wine with dinner, the occasional Aperol spritz — but she’d been hearing on podcasts and reading in the news that even a small amount of alcohol was much worse for her health than had previously been understood. Listen to this article, read by Kirsten Potter My friend was picking up on a swing in the public-health messaging around alcohol. For many years, she might have felt that she was making a healthy choice in having a glass of wine or a beer with dinner. Right around the time when she came of legal age to drink, the early 1990s, some prominent researchers were promoting, and the media helped popularize, the idea that moderate drinking — for women, a drink a night; for men, two — was linked to greater longevity. The cause of that association was not clear, but red wine, researchers theorized, might have anti-inflammatory properties that extended life and protected cardiovascular health. Major health organizations and some doctors always warned that alcohol consumption was linked to higher cancer risk, but the dominant message moderate drinkers heard was one of not just reassurance but encouragement. More recently, though, research has piled up debunking the idea that moderate drinking is good for you. Last year, a major meta-analysis that re-examined 107 studies over 40 years came to the conclusion that no amount of alcohol improves health; and in 2022, a well-designed study found that consuming even a small amount brought some risk to heart health. That same year, Nature published research stating that consuming as little as one or two drinks a day (even less for women) was associated with shrinkage in the brain — a phenomenon normally associated with aging. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29359 - Posted: 06.15.2024

By Janna Levin During traumatic periods and their aftermath, our brains can fall into habitual ways of thinking that may be helpful in the short run but become maladaptive years later. For the brain to readjust to new situations later in life, it needs to be restored to the malleable state it was in when the habits first formed. That is exactly what Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist and psychiatric researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, is working toward in her lab. What is her surprising tool? Psychedelics. JANNA LEVIN: Welcome to “The Joy of Why.” This is Janna Levin. On June 4th, an advisory panel for the Federal Drug Administration recommended against approving the use of the psychedelic drug MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Various concerns, some about safety, overshadowed the demonstrable value of the drug in the opinion of the panel. The path to approval for drug therapies is notoriously fraught with profound complexities, a high bar on proof in clinical trials, the medical injunction to “do no harm,” as well as social and political nuances. But, what’s the fundamental neuroscience behind the news story? Why are so many psychiatric researchers enthusiastic about the promise of psychedelics? We happened to take on this subject a few weeks ago with neuroscientist Gül Dölen. Here is that episode. New drug leads can come from practically anywhere. Penicillin’s discovery was spurred from mold spores that accidentally landed in a petri dish. Cancer treatments can be dredged from the bottom of the sea. And synthetic antibodies can now be engineered from scratch. But there’s a class of drugs that mainstream medicine has generally overlooked that could prove life-changing for many people facing addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress — if scientists embrace the potential power of psychedelics. © 2024 the Simons Foundation.

Keyword: Stress; Depression
Link ID: 29351 - Posted: 06.08.2024

By Andrew Jacobs An independent advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration rejected the use of MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder on Tuesday, highlighting the unparalleled regulatory challenges of a novel therapy using the drug commonly known as Ecstasy. Before the vote, members of the panel raised concerns about the designs of the two studies submitted by the drug’s sponsor, Lykos Therapeutics. Many questions focused on the fact that study participants were by and large able to correctly guess whether they had been given MDMA, also known by the names of Ecstasy or molly. The panel voted 9-2 on whether the MDMA-assisted therapy was effective, and voted 10-1 on whether the proposed treatment’s benefits outweighed its risks. Other panelists expressed concerns over the drug’s potential cardiovascular effects, and possible bias among the therapists and facilitators who guided the sessions and may have positively influenced patient outcomes. A case of misconduct involving a patient and therapist in the study also weighed on some panelists’ minds. Many of the committee members said they were especially worried about the failure of Lykos to collect detailed data from participants on the potential for abuse of a drug that generates feelings of bliss and well-being. “I absolutely agree that we need new and better treatments for PTSD,” said Paul Holtzheimer, deputy director for research at the National Center for PTSD, a panelist who voted no on the question of whether the benefits of MDMA-therapy outweighed the risks. “However, I also note that premature introduction of a treatment can actually stifle development, stifle implementation and lead to premature adoption of treatments that are either not completely known to be safe, not fully effective or not being used at their optimal efficacy,” he added. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29343 - Posted: 06.06.2024

By Andrew Jacobs and Christina Jewett The Food and Drug Administration on Friday raised concerns about the health effects of MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, citing flaws in a company’s studies that could pose major obstacles to approval of a treatment anticipated to help people struggling with the condition. The agency said that bias had seeped into the studies because participants and therapists were readily able to figure out who got MDMA versus a placebo. It also flagged “significant increases” in blood pressure and pulse rates that could “trigger cardiovascular events.” The staff analysis was conducted for an independent advisory panel that will meet Tuesday to consider an application by Lykos Therapeutics for the use of MDMA-assisted therapy. The agency’s concerns highlight the unique and complex issues facing regulators as they weigh the therapeutic value of an illegal drug commonly known as Ecstasy that has long been associated with all-night raves and cuddle puddles. Approval would mark a seismic change in the nation’s tortuous relationship with psychedelic compounds, most of which the Drug Enforcement Administration classifies as illegal substances that have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Research like the current studies on MDMA therapy have corralled the support of various groups and lawmakers from both parties for treatment of PTSD, a condition affecting millions of Americans, especially military veterans who face an outsize risk of suicide. No new therapy has been approved for PTSD in more than 20 years. “What’s happening is truly a paradigm shift for psychiatry,” said David Olson, director of the U.C. Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics. “MDMA is an important step for the field because we really lack effective treatments, period, and people need help now.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29332 - Posted: 06.02.2024

By Jennifer Hassan More people in the United States say they are using marijuana daily or near daily, compared with people who say they are drinking alcohol that often, according to a new study. In 2022, about 17.7 million people reported daily or near-daily marijuana use, compared with 14.7 million people who reported drinking at the same frequency, said the report, which was based on more than four decades of data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It was the first time the survey recorded more frequent users of cannabis than alcohol, the report added. The research was published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction. The research window spans the years 1979 to 2022, and the 27 surveys that were analyzed involved more than 1.6 million participants during that time frame. The study described the growth in daily or near-daily cannabis use as “striking.” While “far more people drink” than use marijuana, high-frequency drinking among Americans is less common, the report said. The 2022 survey found that the median drinker reported drinking on four to five days in a month, compared with 15 to 16 days in a month for cannabis. The study noted that changing trends in cannabis use “parallel corresponding changes in cannabis policy, with declines during periods of greater restriction and growth during periods of policy liberalization.” It stressed, however, that this did not mean there was a causal link, as “both could have been manifestations of changes in underlying culture and attitudes.” Thirty-eight states and D.C. have legalized medical marijuana programs, and 24 states have approved recreational cannabis use.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29323 - Posted: 05.25.2024