Psychedelics go beneath the cell surface to unleash their potentially therapeutic effects.
These drugs are showing promise in clinical trials as treatments for mental health disorders (SN: 12/3/21). Now, scientists might know why. These substances can get inside nerve cells in the cortex — the brain region important for consciousness — and tell the neurons to grow, researchers report in the Feb. 17 Science.
Several mental health conditions, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, are tied to chronic stress, which degrades neurons in the cortex over time. Scientists have long thought that repairing the cells could provide therapeutic benefits, like lowered anxiety and improved mood.
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Psychedelics — including psilocin, which comes from magic mushrooms, and LSD — do that repairing by promoting the growth of nerve cell branches that receive information, called dendrites (SN: 11/17/20). The behavior might explain the drugs’ positive outcomes in research. But how they trigger cell growth was a mystery.
It was already known that, in cortical neurons, psychedelics activate a certain protein that receives signals and gives instructions to cells. This protein, called the 5-HT2A receptor, is also stimulated by serotonin, a chemical made by the body and implicated in mood. But a study in 2018 determined that serotonin doesn’t make these neurons grow. That finding “was really leaving us scratching our heads,” says chemical neuroscientist David Olson, director of the Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics at the University of California, Davis.
To figure out why these two types of chemicals affect neurons differently, Olson and colleagues tweaked some substances to…
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