20 Ocak 2017 Cuma
1 Aralık 2016 Perşembe
Magic mushroom ingredient psilocybin can lift depression, studies show
A single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, can lift the anxiety and depression experienced by people with advanced cancer for six months or even longer, two new studies show.
Researchers involved in the two trials in the United States say the results are remarkable. The volunteers had “profoundly meaningful and spiritual experiences” which made most of them rethink life and death, ended their despair and brought about lasting improvement in the quality of their lives.
The results of the research are published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology together with no less than ten commentaries from leading scientists in the fields of psychiatry and palliative care, who all back further research. While the effects of magic mushrooms have been of interest to psychiatry since the 1950s, the classification of all psychedelics in the US as schedule 1 drugs in the 1970s, in the wake of the Vietnam war and the rise of recreational drug use in the hippy counter-culture, has erected daunting legal and financial obstacles to running trials.
“I think it is a big deal both in terms of the findings and in terms of the history and what it represents. It was part of psychiatry and vanished and now it’s been brought back,” said Dr Stephen Ross, director of addiction psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center and lead investigator of the study that was based there.
Around 40-50% of newly diagnosed cancer patients suffer some sort of depression or anxiety. Antidepressants have little effect, particularly on the “existential” depression that can lead some to feel their lives are meaningless and contemplate suicide.
The main findings of the NYU study, which involved 29 patients, and the larger one from Johns Hopkins University with 51 patients, that a single dose of the medication can lead to immediate reduction in the depression and anxiety caused by cancer and that the effect can last up to eight months, “is unprecedented,” said Ross. “We don’t have anything like it.”
The results of the studies were very similar, with around 80% of the patients attributing moderately or greatly improved wellbeing or life satisfaction to a single high dose of the drug, given with psychotherapy support.
Professor Roland Griffiths, of the departments of psychiatry and neuroscience who led the study at Johns Hopkins University school of medicine, said he did not expect the findings, which he described as remarkable. “I am bred as a sceptic. I was sceptical at the outset that this drug could produce long-lasting changes,” he said. These were people “facing the deepest existential questions that humans can encounter – what is the nature of life and death, the meaning of life.”
But the results were similar to those they had found in earlier studies in healthy volunteers. “In spite of their unique vulnerability and the mood disruption that the illness and contemplation of their death has prompted, these participants have the same kind of experiences, that are deeply meaningful, spiritually significant and producing enduring positive changes in life and mood and behaviour,” he said.
Patients describe the experiences as “re-organisational”, said Griffiths. Some in the field had used the term “mystical”, which he thought was unfortunate. “It sounds unscientific. It sounds like we’re postulating mechanisms other than neuroscience and I’m certainly not making that claim.”
Ross said psilocybin activates a sub-type of serotonin receptor in the brain. “Our brains are hard-wired to have these kinds of experiences – these alterations of consciousness. We have endogenous chemicals in our brain. We have a little system that, when you tickle it, it produces these altered states that have been described as spiritual states, mystical states in different religious branches.
“They are defined by a sense of oneness – people feel that their separation between the personal ego and the outside world is sort of dissolved and they feel that they are part of some continuous energy or consciousness in the universe. Patients can feel sort of transported to a different dimension of reality, sort of like a waking dream.”
Some patients describe seeing images from their childhood and very commonly, scenes or images from a confrontation with cancer, he said. The doctors warn patients that it may happen and not to be scared, but to embrace it and pass through it, he said.
The commentators writing in the journal include two past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association, the past president of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology, a previous deputy director of the Office of USA National Drug Control Policy and a previous head of the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority.
The journal editor, Professor David Nutt, was himself involved in a small trial of psilocybin in a dozen people with severe depression in the UK in May. The ten commentators in the journal, he writes in an editorial, “all essentially say the same thing: it’s time to take psychedelic treatments in psychiatry and oncology seriously, as we did in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Much more research needs to be done, he writes. “But the key point is that all agree we are now in an exciting new phase of psychedelic psychopharmacology that needs to be encouraged not impeded.”
The studies were funded by the Heffter Research Institute in the USA. “These findings, the most profound to date in the medical use of psilocybin, indicate it could be more effective at treating serious psychiatric diseases than traditional pharmaceutical approaches, and without having to take a medication every day,” said its medical director George Greer.
Magic mushroom ingredient psilocybin can lift depression, studies show
20 Ocak 2014 Pazartesi
Red wine ingredient linked to decrease diabetes risk
Those who ate the most anthocyanins had been also at reduced threat of continual irritation, which is linked to a amount of situations like diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer.
The results, published in the Journal of Nutrition, also showed that ladies whose diet was wealthy in flavones – an additional compound found in chocolate – had higher amounts of a protein which assists regulate glucose levels.
Prof Aedin Cassidy of the University of East Anglia, who led the examine, stated: “This is 1 of the initial huge-scale human scientific studies to seem at how these powerful bioactive compounds may well reduce the chance of diabetes.
“What we do not yet know is precisely how a lot of these compounds are necessary to probably lessen the risk of Kind 2 diabetes.”
Prof Tim Spector, director of the TwinsUK study at King’s School London, who took component in the investigation, added: “This is an thrilling discovering that exhibits that some parts of food items that we contemplate unhealthy like chocolate or wine could contain some useful substances.
“There are numerous motives which includes genetics why individuals prefer certain foods so we need to be cautious right up until we check them correctly in randomised trials and in folks developing early diabetes.”
Red wine ingredient linked to decrease diabetes risk
17 Ocak 2014 Cuma
Why Becoming In a position To Compartmentalize Is A Essential Ingredient For Chance-Taking
The following post was published on the Expertise@Wharton web site on January 14, 2014.
It is a crazy morning at home, and your spouse is furious at you. Harried, you slam the automobile door shut and race off to work where an important activity awaits.
Your capability to tune out the scenario at residence and concentrate on the occupation at hand is facilitated by your emotional understanding. It is a form of emotional intelligence, according to Jeremy Yip, a lecturer and analysis scholar at Wharton. Compartmentalizing enables a individual to identify what is stressing them out and to allow other, unrelated variables in their existence to stand on their very own merits, Yip says.
But are men and women with large ranges of emotional intelligence capable to go a single phase additional and get risks unrelated to what is stressing them out? Yes, notes Yip, whose analysis review, “The Emotionally Intelligent Choice-Maker: Emotion Knowing Potential Lowers the Impact of Incidental Anxiousness on Risk-taking,” was published in the journal Psychological Science. His co-writer is Stéphane Côté, professor of organizational habits and human resource management at the University of Toronto.
The review shows that folks with lower levels of emotional comprehending let unrelated stressors to make them far more risk averse, even though these with greater levels are a lot more likely to take a likelihood. “By identifying the source of their emotions, individuals with substantial emotional intelligence recognize whether their feelings are irrelevant to the choices they want to make,” Yip notes. “As a end result, they don’t expertise that spillover effect. They may well truly feel anxious, but they do not allow it influence their decision.”
In the study’s very first experiment, the researchers gave 108 University of Toronto students the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Check, which measures ranges of emotional intelligence.
The participants were then split into two groups. A single was provided an anxiety-provoking task: to put together a speech in one minute. To ratchet up the stress, members of that group were informed they would be filmed, and that the footage would later be proven to peers learning academic and social standing at the university. (After the testing was concluded, participants have been informed that there would be no speech right after all.)
The other group was offered a fairly soothing assignment: They have been asked to prepare a grocery record. For compensation, participants in both groups have been provided a separate choice: acquire $ 1, or consider a one particular in 10 chance to get $ ten.
For those offered the demanding speechwriting assignment, people who scored reduced on the emotional intelligence check produced the riskier option — going for the $ 10 — only sixteen.7% of the time. Individuals with increased ranges of emotional intelligence, meanwhile, picked the riskier option 48.three% of the time.
For the relaxed men and women offered the grocery listing assignment, who functioned as a handle group, the benefits have been considerably closer with each other, no matter how considerably emotional intelligence each and every participant possessed.
“As expected, there was a negative impact of incidental nervousness on chance taking among folks with reduce emotion-understanding capability, but there was no effect amongst men and women with larger emotion-knowing potential,” the authors write.
To Worry or Not to Worry?
The second experiment was developed to see if folks with reduce levels of emotional understanding could be prompted into creating the exact same risky options as their counterparts with more emotional understanding.
This experiment began out much like the initial: Every person was given the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso test to measure their emotional intelligence. In a separate experimental session, the 132 participants have been both asked to mentally prepare a speech or a grocery listing.
But this time, each and every group was subdivided into two elements. One was provided no even more instruction the other was tipped off that they may really feel worried because making a speech is a naturally anxiousness-producing task, or that they may feel calm since producing a grocery checklist is not nerve-racking. This step, Yip says, was developed to give a bit of emotional intelligence for individuals to whom it does not come naturally.
All participants had been then offered the decision of giving their e-mail tackle to get much more info about attending a clinic to receive a flu shot. They have been told that selecting not to have the shot was the riskier choice, simply because they were more most likely to get sick.
Why Becoming In a position To Compartmentalize Is A Essential Ingredient For Chance-Taking