Glenn Dumont and colleagues have an excellent new paper in social neuroscience showing that 100 mg MDMA increases oxytocin and prosocial feelings in people a controlled laboratory setting. It’s about time someone properly confirmed this theory!
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Pål Johansen and Teri Krebs have published a short Perspective paper hypothesizing three potential mechanisms by which MDMA might be helpful in anxiety disorders.
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In the UK, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) has written a review of MDMA (‘ecstasy’), its harms and its legal classification.
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Here is a list of four human psychedelic studies that are currently recruiting participants. These are all seeking people with specific illnesses. Most of these details were obtained from ClinicalTrials.gov and maps.org
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Here are two human psychedelic studies that are currently recruiting participants healthy psychedelic-experienced volunteers. (Full disclosure: I am involved in conducting both of these studies.) In a separate entry, I list the studies that are seeking people with specific illnesses who can be psychedelic-naive. Most of the details on these other studies were obtained from ClinicalTrials.gov and maps.org
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Dumont and colleagues have published a paper in which they describe the physiological effects of giving MDMA along with alcohol to people. One of the interesting things about this paper is that they measured plasma concentrations of antidiuretic hormone (ADH). (ADH is the hormone that causes the kidneys to conserve water, thus regulating the water balance in the body.)
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The Nature News piece on MDMA and PTSD (see my blog entry) wrote:
Did Nature News really just say that old reports don’t let us conclude MDMA psychotherapy works since maybe it was just the LSD?!
And in any case, isn’t the only citation for those Swiss data the MAPS newsletter?
Nature has a news story by Arran Frood (who seems to cover the psychedelic news beat) that discusses the recently completed first U.S. study of MDMA in combination with psychotherapy as a treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Results of the study, carried out by Michael Mithoefer and colleagues in South Carolina and sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, were just presented in poster form at the annual meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. The abstract is reproduced at the bottom of this entry.
(Because conference presentations are not peer-reviewed and often present preliminary analyses, scientists often reserve judgment until the formal paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal and they can read the details for themselves. However, the preliminary results sound promising.)
According to the Nature news piece:
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