Psilocybin has been shown to induce fast and sustained symptoms improvements across various psychiatric conditions, yet its long-term mechanisms of action are not fully understood. Initial evidence suggests that longitudinal functional and structural brain changes implicate fronto-striatal-thalamic (FST) circuitry, a broad system involved in goal-directed be...
Psychedelic drugs are under active consideration for clinical use and have generated significant interest for their potential as anti-nociceptive treatments for chronic pain, and for addressing conditions like depression, frequently co-morbid with pain. This review primarily explores the utility of preclinical animal models in investigating the potential of ...
BackgroundAnorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric disorder with high morbidity, mortality, and relapse rates, most commonly emerging during adolescence. Despite specialized psychological and nutritional treatments, outcomes remain suboptimal, with high rates of relapse and chronicity. Psilocybin has been investigated with preliminary efficacy in other ...
A central challenge in neuroscience is understanding how the human brain is organised to support optimal functioning and adaptability. One approach to characterise complex brain dynamics is by artificially perturbing whole-brain models. Here, we asked whether whole-brain organisation under perturbation in major depressive disorder (MDD) changes after interve...
The goal of this study is to learn how psilocybin delivered with mindfulness-based therapy may help symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is an assessor-blinded, randomized, controlled study in participants with PTSD. The study will investigate the changes in brain activity, connectivity, and microstructural neuroplasticity assessed using EE...
In recent decades, the psychedelic psilocybin has been studied as a potential treatment for major depressive disorder (MDD), offering an alternative to traditional antidepressants. However, the brain changes underlying the clinical effects of different interventions remain unclear. Here, we investigated the effects of psilocybin and a conventional antidepres...
This study aims to determine the safety and preliminary efficacy of psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy in improving alcohol-related outcomes among adults with severe alcohol use disorder in a a double-blind, dose-comparison concurrent control, randomized trial. Participants will undergo structured psychotherapy and will be randomized to two psilocybin session...
Abstract Psilocybin induces profound alterations in consciousness, yet prevailing neural models often describe a monolithic change in brain connectivity that may not fully capture the multifaceted nature of the psychedelic state. To test the hypothesis of a composite neural state, this study applied a data-driven framework, Connectome Independent Component A...
ABSTRACT Treatment-resistant depression (TRD) is characterized by chronic symptoms, impaired functioning, and limited response to conventional antidepressant therapy. Contemporary reviews have highlighted increasing interest in psilocybin-assisted therapy as a mechanistically novel approach for depressive disorders, grounded in early feasibility work demonst...
The primary purpose of this study is to evaluate the feasibility and estimate the efficacy of psilocybin-facilitated treatment for cocaine use. We also will monitor the impact of psilocybin-facilitated treatment on the use of other drugs and outcomes relevant to cocaine involvement. MRI assessment is a unique aspect of this study. As a potential biological m...
Background: Social anxiety disorder is a chronic and disabling condition with limited response to standard therapies. Low-dose psilocybin may enhance the effectiveness of exposure-based treatments by modulating neural circuits associated with fear and avoidance. Virtual reality exposure therapy offers a controlled and individualized platform for intervention...
Psychedelic drugs are serotonergic hallucinogens that can be divided into two types: naturally occurring (psilocybin, psilocin, and N,N-dimethyltryptamine) and synthetic (LSD, MDMA, 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine, and ketamine). Psychedelics generally work on 5-hydroxytryptamine receptors and might be useful in cognitive enhancement, brain connectivity, neu...
The integration of psychedelics and music in therapeutic settings is gaining recognition for its potential to enhance mental health outcomes. This review synthesizes current evidence on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying this synergy, focusing on receptor-level pathways (e.g., 5-HT2A receptor agonism, BDNF-TrkB signaling) and neural circuit dynamics (...
BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Methamphetamine (MA) use disorder is associated with widespread disruption of large-scale brain networks involved in cognitive control, attention, and salience processing. Resting-state functional MRI (rs-fMRI) provides a means to characterize these alterations; however, little is known about the capacity for functional network reorga...
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by persistent social-communication deficits, cognitive rigidity, and atypical sensory processing. Current pharmacological treatments, including risperidone and aripiprazole, provide only limited symptomatic relief and do not address the underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Converging evidence implicates dysre...
Psilocybin and other serotonergic drugs acutely alter human brain function and large-scale connectivity as measured with BOLD fMRI, but whether these effects are frequency-specific remains unknown. We applied multitaper spectral and cross-spectral analyses to resting-state fMRI data from 28 healthy volunteers scanned multiple times acutely following oral psi...
Psychedelics, such as psilocybin, reorganise large-scale brain connectivity, yet how these changes are reflected across electrophysiological (electroencephalogram, EEG) and haemodynamic (functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI) networks remains unclear. We present Brain-MGF, a multimodal graph fusion network for joint EEG-fMRI connectivity analysis. For ...
The goal of this neuroimaging clinical trial is to test whether psilocybin produces significant immediate changes in functional brain activity in networks associated with mood regulation and depression compared to placebo in patients with depression. The trial aims to determine if psilocybin: 1. Changes connectivity within brain networks associated with mood...
The goal of this clinical trial is to learn if a single dose of psilocybin (5mg Vs 10mg Vs 25mg) alongside psychotherapy is safe and can help treat treatment resistant depression (TRD) with co-occurring substance use disorder (SUD) in veterans and first responders. We seek to answer: * Whether 5mgs, 10mgs and 25mgs of psilocybin are safe in individuals with ...
Uncovering the neural basis of psychedelics’ potent effects on brain activity and conscious experience has great potential for understanding their therapeutic effects. Numerous studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) uncovered a strong effect of psychedelics on global properties of fMRI signal, but how they map to underlying neural phenome...