By Andrew Jacobs and Jacey Fortin News reports detailing Elon Musk’s drug use have prompted renewed attention to ketamine, a powerful anesthetic that has become increasingly popular as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression and other mental health issues. Although Mr. Musk has acknowledged using ketamine in the past to treat depression, he has denied suggestions that he is currently using ketamine — or any other drug. “I am NOT taking drugs!” he wrote last week in a social media post following the publication of an article in The New York Times that described reports of his use of drugs on the campaign trail last year. Those drugs included ketamine and other psychedelic compounds, among them MDMA and psilocybin mushrooms. Mr. Musk left the White House last week. Since then, he and President Trump have traded barbs on social media over the president’s domestic policy bill and have mentioned government contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies and Mr. Musk’s relationship to the White House. Mr. Trump, who was briefed on the article in The Times, has been telling associates in the last day or so that Musk’s “crazy” behavior is linked to his drug use, according to a Times report citing two people with knowledge of Mr. Trump’s private conversations. But later on Friday, Mr. Trump told reporters he did not want to comment on Mr. Musk’s drug use. The very public feud between the two men has once again drawn unflattering attention to ketamine, a drug that has become increasingly available at legal clinics across the country. It is also used recreationally and can be dangerous when misused. What is ketamine, and is it legal? Ketamine is an injectable, short-acting dissociative anesthetic that can have hallucinogenic effects at certain doses. It distorts perceptions of sight and sound and makes users feel detached from pain and their surroundings. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29824 - Posted: 06.07.2025

By Lauren Schenkman Addiction may be known as a disease of “more,” but drug-taking also taps a powerful drive for less that can suppress reward in the brain, even at low doses, according to a new study of nicotine responses in mice. The results suggest that the systems of reward and aversion that regulate addiction are more intertwined than previously thought. “That’s absolutely fascinating, because the field has been dominated by this notion of the go, the drive to get drug, but the drive is moderated by the stop,” says Paul Kenny, professor of neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, who was not involved in the work. A faulty “stop” signal could be one of the culprits in addiction, he adds. Recent studies have begun to explore this stop signal. Intravenous nicotine activates nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on dopamine neurons in the midbrain’s ventral tegmental area (VTA), generating a rewarding effect that promotes more drug consumption. And high doses activate a tiny adjacent area, the interpeduncular nucleus (IPN), which drives aversion, previous studies have suggested. But doses too low to excite the VTA also activate the IPN in mice, the new work shows. In another experiment, the team used fluorescent proteins to find where axons from the IPN terminate and to identify the intermediate player connecting the IPN and the VTA: the laterodorsal tegmental nucleus (LDTg). The findings were published in Neuron in April. “This was very thrilling,” says the study’s principal investigator, Alexandre Mourot, research director in brain plasticity at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM). It suggests that at very low doses, the VTA does not respond because the IPN “erases the rewarding properties of the drug,” he says. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29817 - Posted: 06.04.2025

Alison Abbott Daiza Gordon watched her two younger brothers die when they were adolescents. They had Hunter syndrome, a rare, incurable disease — predominantly affecting boys — in which a gene for an important enzyme is missing. Guilt compounded her grief when her attempts to resuscitate her youngest brother failed. She was just 19 years old. Gordon went on to discover how merciless genetics can be. Her own three sons were all born with the condition. When her two eldest hit their second birthdays, the symptoms started to emerge: a thickening of facial features, loss of language, hearing and movement and other impacts to mental and physical development. But she sees hope for her sons that was denied to her brothers. Her children are enrolled in a clinical trial testing a technology to carry a replacement for the missing enzyme, called iduronate-2-sulfatase (IDS), into the brain. Early results indicate improvement in some of the condition’s cognitive and physical symptoms. Gordon’s eldest sons are no longer deaf and they have started to run around. They are meeting developmental milestones she’d never dared to hope for. Her two-year-old, who started the therapy when he was just three months old, is showing none of the early symptoms. “When I look at them, I realize they have a chance of an actual future,” says Gordon. Regular infusions of replacement IDS has been the standard of care for the past two decades, and it protects important organs such as the liver and kidneys from damage. But without help, the large enzyme can’t make it through the protective barrier that separates the blood from one of the most important organs — the brain. For Gordon’s children, that help comes from an innovative molecular transport system, a chemical tag attached to IDS that shuttles it through the tightly joined cells that make up the blood–brain barrier. Several such shuttles, which take advantage of natural transport systems in the brain, are now being developed. With the ability to move large biological drugs — including antibodies, proteins and the viruses used in gene therapy — these shuttles promise to revolutionize neuropharmacology. And that’s not just for rare diseases such as Hunter syndrome, but also for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and other common brain disorders. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 29811 - Posted: 05.28.2025

By Frieda Klotz In 2006, a new study on antidepressants was making headlines with its promising results: Two-thirds of participants who tried various antidepressants recovered from their depression symptoms within less than a year. The findings seemed to offer hope to the tens of millions of Americans who suffer from depression. But Henry Edmund “Ed” Pigott, then a psychologist in private practice, wasn’t buying it. After further exploring the study — a major National Institutes of Health trial that enrolled 4,000 patients — he was convinced that the researchers’ methods greatly inflated their results, almost doubling them. In other words, the drugs may work, but not for as many people as the study suggested. Henry Edmund Pigott, now a retired psychologist, began investigating a major National Institutes of Health trial on depression in 2006. Decades later, after many studies based on the landmark trial have been published, he still has questions. “Once I got started on it, it was like, ‘Okay, this really needs to be exposed,’” said Pigott, who is now retired. His suspicion sparked a two-decade quest to correct the record and obtain a retraction from the authors of the NIH study, whose work had received $35 million of federal funding. In 2023, Pigott and colleagues published a reanalysis of the NIH data in BMJ Open, finding that the original study’s remission rates were roughly half of what was reported. Pigott isn’t against antidepressants wholesale — he said he just wants patients to understand the complete risks and benefits. And many experts and clinicians stress that antidepressants are lifesaving medications. David Matuskey, a psychiatrist and associate professor at Yale University, described them as vital tools to help patients in desperate need: “Is it a perfect tool? No, but it’s an important one.”

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29806 - Posted: 05.28.2025

By Christina Caron Tasha Hedges took Xanax for 20 years to treat her anxiety and panic attacks, exactly as a psychiatrist had prescribed it. Then in 2022, that doctor unexpectedly died. A general practitioner continued her prescription but retired shortly afterward. The next doctor moved to Canada. Finally, Ms. Hedges found a new psychiatrist. “The first thing he did was start yelling at me that I had been on Xanax too long,” said Ms. Hedges, 41, who lives in Falling Waters, W.Va. “He ripped me off my meds.” Discontinuing the drug typically requires decreasing the dose slowly over months or even years, a process called tapering. Ms. Hedges stopped cold turkey. Debilitating withdrawal symptoms followed: hot flashes, cold sweats, restless legs, the shakes and teeth grinding. “It was a nightmare,” she said. Two years after discontinuing the medication, she is still dealing with the fallout. “My brain has not been the same.” In social media groups and websites such as BenzoBuddies, people like Ms. Hedges say they have become physically dependent on benzodiazepines. Many then get cut off from their medication or taper too quickly, and face dangerous and potentially life-threatening withdrawal symptoms that can linger long after the drugs are discontinued. Some doctors, fearful of the risks and stigma associated with these drugs, refuse to prescribe them at all. “Benzos generate as much anxiety in the prescriber as they do in the patient,” said Dr. Ronald M. Winchel, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. “Do I start it? Is it the right context? Is it safe? Is my patient going to abuse it? What will my colleagues think/ © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 29789 - Posted: 05.17.2025

By Lizzie Wade As John Rick excavated one of the many underground chambers at the ancient Peruvian site of Chavín de Huántar in 2017 his trowel hit something intriguing, and exceedingly delicate. It was a cigarette-size tube made of animal bone and packed full of sediment. The following year, his team found almost two dozen more. Rick, an archaeologist at Stanford University, suspected these bone tubes were pieces of ancient drug paraphernalia. Now, a chemical analysis of plant material preserved inside the bone tubes confirms ancient people used them to inhale snuffs made of tobacco and a hallucinogenic plant known as vilca. Rick and colleagues say the rituals involving these drugs may have helped the people of Chavín consolidate their power and influence some 2500 years ago, a time when complex social and political hierarchies were first taking shape in Peru. Although researchers have long suspected rituals at Chavín involved hallucinogenic drugs, “What’s exciting about this paper is that, for first time, we have actual evidence,” says José Capriles, an archaeologist at Pennsylvania State University who wasn’t involved in the research but has studied psychoactive drugs used by ancient people. Chavín de Huántar, which was occupied in the first millennium B.C.E., is renowned for its intricate stone carvings, often depicting animal-human hybrids or transformations of human into beast, and an extensive network of underground chambers. It also had a broad cultural reach. The site in Peru’s north-central highlands abounds with seashells and obsidian, neither found locally, and Chavín-style art shows up in many places throughout the Andes and on the Peruvian coast. “Chavín was part of the first big moment in Andean prehistory when people, ideas, and goods were circulating quite extensively,” says Dan Contreras, an archaeologist at the University of Florida and a co-author of the new paper.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29775 - Posted: 05.07.2025

By Jan Hoffman Fentanyl overdoses have finally begun to decline over the past year, but that good news has obscured a troubling shift in illicit drug use: a nationwide surge in methamphetamine, a powerful, highly addictive stimulant. This isn’t the ’90s club drug or even the blue-white tinged crystals cooked up in “Breaking Bad.” As cartels keep revising lab formulas to make their product more addictive and potent, often using hazardous chemicals, many experts on addiction think that today’s meth is more dangerous than older versions. Here is what to know. What is meth? Meth, short for methamphetamine, is a stimulant, a category of drugs that includes cocaine. Meth is far stronger than coke, with effects that last many hours longer. It comes in pill, powder or paste form and is smoked, snorted, swallowed or injected. Meth jolts the central nervous system and prompts the brain to release exorbitant amounts of reinforcing, feel-good neurotransmitters such as dopamine, which help people experience euphoria and drive them to keep seeking it. Meth is an amphetamine, a category of stimulant drugs perhaps best known to the public as the A.D.H.D. prescription medications Adderall and Vyvanse. Those stimulants are milder and shorter-lasting than meth but, if misused, they too can be addictive. What are meth’s negative side effects? They vary, depending on the tolerance of the person taking it and the means of ingestion. After the drug’s rush has abated, many users keep bingeing it. They forget to drink water and are usually unable to sleep or eat for days. In this phase, known as “tweaking,” users can become hyper-focused on activities such as taking apart bicycles — which they forget to reassemble — or spending hours collecting things like pebbles and shiny gum wrappers. They may become agitated and aggressive. Paranoia, hallucinations and psychosis can set in. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29750 - Posted: 04.19.2025

By Erin Blakemore Consuming more than eight alcoholic drinks a week is associated with brain injuries linked to Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline, a recent study in the journal Neurology suggests. The analysis looked for links between heavy drinking and brain health. Researchers used autopsy data from the Biobank for Aging Studies at the University of São Paulo Medical School in Brazil collected between 2004 and 2024. The team analyzed data from 1,781 people ages 50 or older at death. The average age at death was 74.9. With the help of surveys of the deceased’s next of kin, researchers gathered information about the deceased’s cognitive function and alcohol consumption in the three months before their death. Among participants, 965 never drank, 319 drank up to seven drinks per week (moderate drinking), and 129 had eight or more drinks per week (heavy drinking). Another 368 were former heavy drinkers who had stopped drinking before their last three months of life. The analysis showed that heavy drinkers and former heavy drinkers, respectively, had 41 percent and 31 percent higher odds of neurofibrillary tangles — clumps of the protein tau that accumulate inside brain neurons and have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Moderate, heavy and former heavy drinkers also had a higher risk of hyaline arteriolosclerosis, which thickens the walls of small blood vessels in the brain, impeding blood flow and causing brain damage over time. Though 40 percent of those who never drank had vascular brain lesions, they were more common in moderate (44.6 percent), heavy (44.1 percent) and former heavy drinkers (50.2 percent), the study found.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 29749 - Posted: 04.19.2025

The devastating stimulant has been hitting Portland, Maine hard, even competing with fentanyl as the street drug of choice. Although a fentanyl overdose can be reversed with Narcan, no medicine can reverse a meth overdose. Nor has any been approved to treat meth addiction. Unlike fentanyl, which sedates users, meth can make people anxious and violent. Its effects can overwhelm not just users but community residents and emergency responders. John once fielded customer complaints for a telecommunications company. Now he usually hangs out with friends in the courtyard of a center offering services to help people who use drugs, hitting his pipe, or as he calls it, “getting methicated.” He usually lives outdoors, though he can sometimes handle a few days at a shelter. By noon, he tries to stop smoking meth, so he can get to sleep later that night. Quitting is not on his radar: meth rules his life. “We cannot ride on the railroad, the railroad rides upon us,” he said, with a nod to Henry David Thoreau. Most weekdays, Bill Burns, an addiction and mental health specialist with the Portland police, walks the Bayside neighborhood, checking in on folks. On Thursdays, he rewards the regulars he drives to addiction treatment clinics with his own homemade jolts of dopamine: sugar-dense, Rice Krispie-style treats. Recently, he encountered a young man in full meth psychosis, wild-eyed, bare-chested and bleeding, flinging himself against concrete barriers in an alley. Mr. Burns slipped between the man and a brick wall and wrapped his arms protectively around him. Even as the man flailed uncontrollably, smacking Mr. Burns and smearing blood on his shirt, he managed to stammer, “Sorry!” Speaking softly, Mr. Burns kept repeating, “You’re going to be safe. You’re OK. We’re here because we just want to make sure you’re safe. No, you’re not in trouble. Nobody wants to hurt you. ” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29747 - Posted: 04.16.2025

By Roni Caryn Rabin Middle-aged and older adults who sought hospital or emergency room care because of cannabis use were almost twice as likely to develop dementia over the next five years, compared with similar people in the general population, a large Canadian study reported on Monday. When compared with adults who sought care for other reasons, the risk of developing dementia was still 23 percent higher among users of cannabis, the study also found. The study included the medical records of six million people in Ontario from 2008 to 2021. The authors accounted for health and sociodemographic differences between comparison groups, some of which play a role in cognitive decline. The data do not reveal how much cannabis the subjects had been using, and the study does not prove that regular or heavy cannabis use plays a causal role in dementia. But the finding does raise serious concerns that require further exploration, said Dr. Daniel T. Myran, the first author of the study, which was published in JAMA Neurology. “Figuring out whether or not cannabis use or heavy regular chronic use causes dementia is a challenging and complicated question that you don’t answer in one study,” said Dr. Myran, an assistant professor of family medicine at University of Ottawa. “This contributes to the literature and to a sign, or signal, of concern.” Dr. Myran’s previous research has found that patients with cannabis use disorder died at almost three times the rate of individuals without the disorder over a five-year period. He has also reported that more cases of schizophrenia and psychosis in Canada have been linked to cannabis use disorder since the drug was legalized. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29745 - Posted: 04.16.2025

Alexandra Topping The benefits of taking drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outweigh the impact of increases in blood pressure and heart rate, according to a new study. An international team of researchers led by scientists from the University of Southampton found the majority of children taking ADHD medication experienced small increases in blood pressure and pulse rates, but that the drugs had “overall small effects”. They said the study’s findings highlighted the need for “careful monitoring”. Prof Samuele Cortese, the senior lead author of the study, from the University of Southampton, said the risks and benefits of taking any medication had to be assessed together, but for ADHD drugs the risk-benefit ratio was “reassuring”. “We found an overall small increase in blood pressure and pulse for the majority of children taking ADHD medications,” he said. “Other studies show clear benefits in terms of reductions in mortality risk and improvement in academic functions, as well as a small increased risk of hypertension, but not other cardiovascular diseases. Overall, the risk-benefit ratio is reassuring for people taking ADHD medications.” About 3 to 4% of adults and 5% of children in the UK are believed to have ADHD, a neurodevelopmental disorder with symptoms including impulsiveness, disorganisation and difficulty focusing, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice). Doctors can prescribe stimulants, such as methylphenidate, of which the best-known brand is Ritalin. Other stimulant medications used to treat ADHD include lisdexamfetamine and dexamfetamine. Non-stimulant drugs include atomoxetine, an sNRI (selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor), and guanfacine. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29734 - Posted: 04.09.2025

By Diana Kwon Charlene Sunkel was 19 when she started hearing voices and strange thoughts began filling her head. People wanted to infiltrate her mind, to poison her, to rat her out to the police. She stopped making eye contact, convinced that it would enable others to steal her thoughts. Once sociable and outgoing, Sunkel withdrew from friends and family, worried that they were conspiring against her. On her way to work, she had visions of men in hoods from the corner of her eye. As the illness progressed, she lost the ability to understand what people were saying, and when she spoke, the words would not come out right. About a year after her symptoms started, Sunkel was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Delusions, hallucinations and disordered thinking are collectively known as psychosis. These “positive” symptoms are among the most widely recognized aspects of schizophrenia. For about two thirds of patients with schizophrenia—which affects approximately 23 million people around the world—traditional antipsychotic drugs are often highly effective at treating psychosis. But these drugs frequently come with problematic side effects. And they do little to help with the so-called negative symptoms of schizophrenia, such as emotional flatness and social withdrawal, or with other issues involving thinking and memory referred to as cognitive problems. Until quite recently, all antipsychotics worked in essentially the same way. They blocked the activity of dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain involved in motivation, learning, habit formation, and other processes. The successful treatment of psychosis with dopamine blockers led many clinicians to believe that they understood schizophrenia and that its underlying cause was an imbalance in dopamine. When a particular antipsychotic did not work in a patient, all doctors needed to do, they thought, was up the dosage or try another dopamine-targeting drug. But the arrival last September of a new drug, KarXT, supports an emerging awareness among clinicians that schizophrenia is more complex than most of them had realized. KarXT is the first antipsychotic to target a molecule other than dopamine. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29711 - Posted: 03.19.2025

By Ellen Barry On a recent Friday morning, Daniel, a lawyer in his early 40s, was in a Zoom counseling session describing tapering off lithium. Earlier that week he had awakened with racing thoughts, so anxious that he could not read, and he counted the hours before sunrise. At those moments, Daniel doubted his decision to wean off the cocktail of psychiatric medications which had been part of his life since his senior year in high school, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Was this his body adjusting to the lower dosage? Was it a reaction to the taco seasoning he had eaten the night before? Or was it what his psychiatrist would have called it: a relapse? “It still does go to the place of — what if the doctors are right?” said Daniel. On his screen, Laura Delano nodded sympathetically. Ms. Delano is not a doctor; her main qualification, she likes to say, is having been “a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of 13 and 27.” During those years, when she attended Harvard and was a nationally ranked squash player, she was prescribed 19 psychiatric medications, often in combinations of three or four at a time. Then Ms. Delano decided to walk away from psychiatric care altogether, a journey she detailed in a new memoir, “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.” Fourteen years after taking her last psychotropic drug, Ms. Delano projects a radiant good health that also serves as her argument — living proof that, all along, her psychiatrists were wrong. Since then, to the alarm of some physicians, an online DIY subculture focused on quitting psychiatric medications has expanded and begun to mature into a service industry. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29710 - Posted: 03.19.2025

By Christina Caron Victoria Ratliff, the wealthy financier’s wife on season 3 of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” has a problem: She keeps popping pills. And her drug of choice, the anti-anxiety medication lorazepam, has left her a little loopy. In the show, which follows guests vacationing at a fictional resort, Victoria pairs her medication with wine, which leads her to nod off at the dinner table. Sometimes she slurs her words. When she notices that her pill supply is mysteriously dwindling, she asks her children if they’re stealing them. “You don’t have enough lorazepam to get through one week at a wellness spa?” her daughter, Piper, asks “The White Lotus” is not the only show to recently feature these drugs. The new Max series “The Pitt,” which takes place in an emergency department, includes a story line about a benzodiazepine called Librium. This isn’t a case of Hollywood taking dramatic liberties. Benzodiazepines such as lorazepam and chlordiazepoxide are notorious for having the potential to be highly addictive. They may also come with difficult — sometimes fatal — withdrawal symptoms. The characters’ misuse of benzodiazepine drugs is not uncommon, said Dr. Ian C. Neel, a geriatrician at UC San Diego Health. “We definitely see that a lot in real life as well.” And in recent years, he added, studies have shown that it’s a bigger problem than doctors initially realized. The drugs, which are often called benzos or downers, are commonly used to treat anxiety, panic attacks and sleep disorders like restless leg syndrome. But they can also be used for other reasons, such as to help people manage alcohol withdrawal. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 29705 - Posted: 03.15.2025

By Meghan Rosen and Laura Sanders Millions of Americans take antidepressants to help manage everything from depression and anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, the Trump administration has announced that these drugs, which have been in use for decades and gone through rigorous testing, will be subject to new scrutiny. Invoking a burden of chronic disease, including in children, the administration has pledged to, in its words, “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by” certain commonly prescribed medications. In the coming months, its “Make America Healthy Again” commission plans to review a slew of existing medications, including SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. More than 10 percent of U.S. adults took antidepressants over the previous 30 days, data from 2015 to 2018 show. And SSRIs are among the most widely prescribed of those drugs. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long questioned the safety of antidepressants and other psychiatric medicines, making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about the drugs. For instance, as recently as his January confirmation hearings, he likened taking SSRIs to having a heroin addiction. He also has suggested — without evidence — that SSRIs play a role in school shootings. With the executive order and statements like these, “it’s implied there is something nefarious or harmful” about antidepressants and related medications, says Lisa Fortuna, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents and Their Families. “People may think that they’re dangerous drugs.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29701 - Posted: 03.12.2025

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel Sign up for a clinical trial of a psychedelic drug and you’re agreeing to a potentially bizarre experience. “All of a sudden, your dead grandma or Satan is in front of you,” says psychiatrist Charles Raison of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Some think this consciousness-altering “trip” underlies the potential benefits of drugs such as psilocybin and LSD, which are under study to treat depression, trauma, chronic pain, and more. But the trip can also be a roadblock to assessing the drugs’ effects, making it near-impossible to conceal who is getting an active substance and who’s been assigned to placebo—a trial strategy called blinding that aims to keep participants’ expectations from skewing their response to a drug. This “functional unblinding” is not unique to psychedelics, but it’s especially pronounced in this drug class. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expressed concern about the issue in psychedelic trials. And it was among the critiques FDA advisers leveled at Lykos Therapeutics, whose application for MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) FDA rejected last summer. Now, scientists and companies are experimenting with trial designs meant to shield participants from recognizing what they’re getting, or to separate expectations from the drug’s impact on health. These include incorporating a range of doses; giving the drug, with permission, to people who are asleep; and misleading participants about how a trial is set up. Companies running large-scale psychedelic trials mostly view unblinding as inevitable. Participants “are going to feel” the drug, “that’s just how it is,” says Rob Barrow, CEO of MindMed, which has late-stage trials underway to test LSD’s ability to ease anxiety. But he believes there are ways to parse a drug’s efficacy even if people know they’re getting it. In one recent trial, MindMed recruited 198 people with anxiety, giving some a placebo and the others LSD at one of four doses. Virtually all who received active drug correctly guessed that they’d gotten it. But those on the two higher doses saw clinically meaningful reduced anxiety, whereas those on the lower doses didn’t. That split means the benefit “has to be due to something other than thinking you’re getting drug,” Barrow says. MindMed is using a lower, nontherapeutic dose as well as a higher dose in an ongoing phase 3 trial, and hopes to report results next year.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29691 - Posted: 03.05.2025

By Heidi Ledford A slimy barrier lining the brain’s blood vessels could hold the key to shielding the organ from the harmful effects of ageing, according to a study in mice. The study showed that this oozy barrier deteriorates with time, potentially allowing harmful molecules into brain tissue and sparking inflammatory responses. Gene therapy to restore the barrier reduced inflammation in the brain and improved learning and memory in aged mice. The work was published today in Nature1. The finding shines a spotlight on a cast of poorly understood molecules called mucins that coat the interior of blood vessels throughout the body and give mucus its slippery texture, says Carolyn Bertozzi, a Nobel-prizewinning chemist at Stanford University in California and a lead author of the study. “Mucins play a lot of interesting roles in the body,” she says. “But until recently, we didn’t have the tools to study them. They were invisible.” Snotty barrier Mucins are large proteins decorated with carbohydrates that form linkages with one another, creating a water-laden, gel-like substance. They are crucial constituents of the blood–brain barrier, a system that restricts the movement of some molecules from the blood into the brain. Researchers have long sought ways to sneak medicines past this barrier to treat diseases of the brain. Previous work also showed that the integrity of the barrier erodes with age2, suggesting that it could be an important target for therapies to combat diseases associated with ageing, such as Alzheimer’s disease. But scientists knew little about the contribution of mucins to these changes, until Sophia Shi, a graduate student at Stanford, decided to focus on a mucin-rich layer called the glycocalyx, which lines blood vessels. Shi and her colleagues looked at what happens to the glycocalyx in the brain as mice age. “The mucins on the young blood vessels were thick and juicy and plump,” says Bertozzi. “In the old mice, they were thin and lame and patchy.” © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29688 - Posted: 03.01.2025

By Ellen Barry The Food and Drug Administration has taken a crucial step toward expanding access to the antipsychotic medication clozapine, the only drug approved for treatment-resistant schizophrenia, among the most devastating of mental illnesses. The agency announced on Monday that it was eliminating a requirement that patients submit blood tests before their prescriptions can be filled. Clozapine, which was approved in 1989, is regarded by many physicians as the most effective available treatment for schizophrenia, and research shows that the drug significantly reduces suicidal behavior. Clozapine is also associated with a rare side effect called neutropenia, a drop in white blood cell counts that, in its most severe form, can be life-threatening. In 2015, federal regulators imposed a regimen known as risk evaluation and mitigation strategies, or REMS, that required patients to submit to weekly, biweekly and monthly blood tests that had to be uploaded onto a database and verified by pharmacists. Physicians have long complained that, as a result, clozapine is grossly underutilized. Dr. Frederick C. Nucifora, director of the Adult Schizophrenia Clinic at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said he believed that around 30 percent of patients with schizophrenia would benefit from clozapine — far more than the 4 percent who currently take it. “I have had many patients who were doing terribly, who struggled to function outside the hospital, and cycled through many medications,” he said. “If they go on clozapine, they really tend to not be hospitalized again. I’ve had people go on to finish college and work. It’s quite remarkable.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29683 - Posted: 02.26.2025

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff When President Trump announced plans to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada, one of his stated rationales was to force those countries to curb the flow of fentanyl into the United States. In fiscal year 2024, United States Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 22,000 pounds of pills, powders and other products containing fentanyl, down from 27,000 pounds in the previous fiscal year. More than 105,000 people died from overdoses, three-quarters of them from fentanyl and other opioids, in 2023. It doesn’t take much illicit fentanyl — said to be about 50 times as powerful as heroin and 100 times as powerful as morphine — to cause a fatal overdose. In my article for the magazine, I note that one of the many tragedies of the opioid epidemic is that a proven treatment for opioid addiction, a drug called buprenorphine, has been available in the United States for more than two decades yet has been drastically underprescribed. Tens of thousands of lives might have been saved if it had been more widely used earlier. In his actions and rhetoric, Trump seems to emphasize the reduction of supply as the answer to the fentanyl crisis. But Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has pointed to American demand as a driver of the problem. Indeed, if enough opioid users in the United States ended up receiving buprenorphine and other effective medication-based treatments, perhaps that demand for illicit opioids like fentanyl could be reduced. Devastating losses. Drug overdose deaths, largely caused by the synthetic opioid drug fentanyl, reached record highs in the United States in 2021. Here’s what you should know to keep your loved ones safe: Understand fentanyl’s effects. Fentanyl is a potent and fast-acting drug, two qualities that also make it highly addictive. A small quantity goes a long way, so it’s easy to suffer an overdose. With fentanyl, there is only a short window of time to intervene and save a person’s life during an overdose. Stick to licensed pharmacies. Prescription drugs sold online or by unlicensed dealers marketed as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax are often laced with fentanyl. Only take pills that were prescribed by your doctor and came from a licensed pharmacy. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29677 - Posted: 02.19.2025

By Max Kozlov A sliver of human brain in a small vial starts to melt as lye is added to it. Over the next few days, the caustic chemical will break down the neurons and blood vessels within, leaving behind a grisly slurry containing thousands of tiny plastic particles. Toxicologist Matthew Campen has been using this method to isolate and track the microplastics — and their smaller counterparts, nanoplastics — found in human kidneys, livers and especially brains. Campen, who is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, estimates that he can isolate about 10 grams of plastics from a donated human brain; that’s about the weight of an unused crayon. Microplastics have been found just about everywhere that scientists have looked: on remote islands, in fresh snow in Antarctica, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, in food, in water and in the air that we breathe. And scientists such as Campen are finding them spread throughout the human body. Detection is only the first step, however. Determining precisely what these plastics are doing inside people and whether they’re harmful has been much harder. That’s because there’s no one ‘microplastic’. They come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes and chemical compositions, each of which could affect cells and tissues differently. This is where Campen’s beige sludge comes into play. Despite microplastics’ ubiquity, it’s difficult to determine which microplastics people are exposed to, how they’re exposed and which particles make their way into the nooks and crannies of the body. The samples that Campen collects from cadavers can, in turn, be used to test how living tissues respond to the kinds of plastic that people carry around with them. “Morbidly speaking, the best source I can think of to get good, relevant microplastics is to take an entire human brain and digest it,” says Campen. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Robotics
Link ID: 29669 - Posted: 02.12.2025