Psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in the so-called “magic mushrooms”, may represent a promising new treatment option against anorexia, according to the results of new clinical trials, reports Live Science.
In a small-scale test on a group of 10 women suffering from anorexia, each of the subjects received a single dose of psilocybin under medical supervision and the subjects tolerated the short-term effects of the psychoactive substance without suffering any side effects important. Most patients reported a positive experience with this substance, claiming that their quality of life improved and they felt more optimistic. Four of the participants went into remission from anorexia symptoms three months after treatment.
The results of this study, published the other day in the journal Nature Medicine, will need to be replicated in larger studies to confirm that psilocybin can remove the main symptoms of anorexia, according to the study authors. However, there is currently no approved anorexia medication on the market, and these preliminary results may offer hope for treating this potentially deadly disease.
“There is an urgent need” for new treatment options because anorexia nervosa “has the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric conditions and is notoriously a very expensive and very difficult disease to treat and recover from,” according to statements made for Live Science by Rebecca Park, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, who was not involved in this study.
Anorexia nervosa is a serious mental illness in which people become obsessed with their body weight and restrict their food intake, sometimes resorting to extensive exercise to achieve weight loss. This condition is very difficult to treat, with about half of the patients hospitalized for this cause returning to the hospital within the first year after discharge.
Despite the fact that this disease affects up to 4% of women and 0.3% of men, there are no approved drugs to treat it.
Psilocybin has already shown potential as a treatment for other mental conditions, such as depression, alcoholism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Psilocybin is thought to work by activating receptors in the brain that normally respond to the hormone serotonin – 5-HT2a – the function of which can be reduced in patients with anorexia.
In the first study of its kind, scientists set out to find out whether psilocybin can be a safe and well-tolerated treatment for anorexia. They gave 10 women between the ages of 18 and 40 a single dose of 25 milligrams of synthetic psilocybin under medical supervision.
Following the treatment, 9 out of 10 women reported gaining a more optimistic outlook on life, 8 out of 10 said it was “one of the most meaningful experiences of their lives”, and 7 out of 10 said they felt that their overall quality of life improved. Only four of the participants went into remission after three months, the characteristic symptoms of anorexia being eliminated, notes Agerpres.
2023-09-06 07:37:11
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