Psilocybin Brain - ADHD & Guilt - Memory Proteins - Moving in Childhood & Depression

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Jul 18, 2024, 6:54:46 AM (5 days ago) Jul 18

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/health/psilocybin-psychedelic-mushrooms-brain.html

This Is Literally Your Brain on Drugs

By Andrew Jacobs

July 17, 2024

If you had to come up with a groovy visualization of the human brain on psychedelic drugs, it might look something like this.

The image, as it happens, comes from dozens of brain scans produced by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis who gave psilocybin, the compound in “magic mushrooms,” to participants in a study before sending them into a functional M.R.I. scanner.

The kaleidoscopic whirl of colors they recorded is essentially a heat map of brain changes, with the red, orange and yellow hues reflecting a significant departure from normal activity patterns. The blues and greens reflect normal brain activity that occurs in the so-called functional networks, the neural communication pathways that connect different regions of the brain.

The scans, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, offer a rare glimpse into the wild neural storm associated with mind-altering drugs. Researchers say they could provide a potential road map for understanding how psychedelic compounds like psilocybin, LSD and MDMA can lead to lasting relief from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders.

“Psilocybin, in contrast to any other drug we’ve tested, has this massive effect on the whole brain that was pretty unexpected,” said Dr. Nico Dosenbach, a professor of neurology at Washington University and a senior author of the study. “It was quite shocking when we saw the effect size.”

The study included seven healthy adults who were given either a single dose of psilocybin or a placebo in the form of methylphenidate, the generic version of the amphetamine Ritalin. Each participant underwent a total of 18 brain scans, taken before, during and after the initial dosing.

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/16/a-diagnosis-can-sweep-away-guilt-the-delicate-art-of-treating-adhd

‘A diagnosis can sweep away guilt’: the delicate art of treating ADHD

By Jack Goulder

Late last summer, in the waiting room of a children’s mental health clinic, I found Daniel, a softly spoken 16-year-old boy, flanked by his parents. He had been referred to the clinic for an assessment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). As we took our seats on the plastic sofas in the consulting room, I asked him to tell me about the difficulties he was having. Tentatively, his gaze not leaving the floor, he started talking about school, about how he was finding it impossible to focus and would daydream for hours at a time. His exam results were beginning to show it too, his parents explained, and ADHD seemed to run in the family. They wanted to know more about any medication that could help.

I had just begun a six-month placement working as a junior doctor in the clinic’s ADHD team. Doctors often take a temporary post before they formally apply to train in a speciality. Since medical school I had always imagined I would become a psychiatrist, but I wanted to be sure I was making the right choice.

Armed with a textbook and the memory of some distant lectures, I began my assessment, running through the questions listed in the diagnostic manual. Are you easily distracted? Do you often lose things? Do people say you talk excessively? He answered yes to many of them. Are you accident-prone? He and his parents exchanged a knowing laugh. With Daniel exhibiting so many of the symptoms, I told them, this sounded like ADHD. I felt a sense of relief fill the room.

Later that afternoon, I took Daniel’s case to a meeting where the day’s new referrals were discussed. Half a dozen senior doctors, nurses, psychologists and psychotherapists sat around the table and listened as each case was presented, trying to piece together the story being told and decide what to do next. When it was my turn, I launched into my findings, laying out what Daniel had told me and what I had gleaned from his parents about his childhood.

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https://www.thetransmitter.org/memory/persistent-protein-pairing-enables-memories-to-last/

Persistent protein pairing enables memories to last

By Elissa Welle

One question long plagued memory researcher André Fenton: How can memories last for years when a protein essential to maintaining them, called memory protein kinase Mzeta (PKMzeta), lasts for just days?

The answer, Fenton now says, may lie in PKMzeta’s interaction with another protein, called postsynaptic kidney and brain expressed adaptor protein (KIBRA). Complexes of the two molecules maintain memories in mice for at least one month, according to a new study co-led by Fenton, professor of neural science at New York University.

The bond between the two proteins “protects each of them,” Fenton says, from normal degradation in the cell.

KIBRA preferentially gloms onto potentiated synapses, the study shows. And it may help PKMzeta stick there, too, where the kinase acts as a “molecular switch” to help memories persist, Fenton says.

“As Theseus’ Ship was sustained for generations by continually replacing worn planks with new timbers, long-term memory can be maintained by continual exchange of potentiating molecules at activated synapses,” Fenton and his colleagues write in their paper, which was published last month in Science Advances.

Before this study, the PKMzeta mystery had two “missing puzzle pieces,” says Justin O’Hare, assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of Colorado Denver, who was not involved in the study.

One was how PKMzeta identifies potentiated synapses, part of the cellular mechanism underlying memory formation. The second was how memories persist despite the short lifetime of each PKMzeta molecule. This study “essentially proposes KIBRA as a solution to both of those—and the experiments themselves are pretty convincing and thorough. They do everything multiple ways.”

PKMzeta has been widely studied, but its role in memory has been shrouded in controversy for more than a decade, Fenton says. Although early work suggested that PKMzeta is necessary for memory formation, later studies found that they still form in mice missing the gene for PKMzeta.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/health/moving-childhood-depression.html

Moving in Childhood Contributes to Depression

By Ellen Barry

In recent decades, mental health providers began screening for “adverse childhood experiences” — generally defined as abuse, neglect, violence, family dissolution and poverty — as risk factors for later disorders.

But what if other things are just as damaging?

Researchers who conducted a large study of adults in Denmark, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found something they had not expected: Adults who moved frequently in childhood have significantly more risk of suffering from depression than their counterparts who stayed put in a community.

In fact, the risk of moving frequently in childhood was significantly greater than the risk of living in a poor neighborhood, said Clive Sabel, a professor at the University of Plymouth and the paper’s lead author.

“Even if you came from the most income-deprived communities, not moving — being a ‘stayer’ — was protective for your health,” said Dr. Sabel, a geographer who studies the effect of environment on disease.

“I’ll flip it around by saying, even if you come from a rich neighborhood, but you moved more than once, that your chances of depression were higher than if you hadn’t moved and come from the poorest quantile neighborhoods,” he added.

The study, a collaboration by Aarhus University, the University of Manchester and the University of Plymouth, included all Danes born between 1982 and 2003, more than a million people. Of those, 35,098, or around 2.3 percent, received diagnoses of depression from a psychiatric hospital.

Are you concerned for your teen? If you worry that your teen might be experiencing depression or suicidal thoughts, there are a few things you can do to help. Dr. Christine Moutier, the chief medical officer of the American Foundation for Suicide

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02320-w

Dogs might have evolved to read your emotions

By Freda Kreier

Dogs’ ability to feel your pain could be innate. It is the result of centuries of co-evolution with humans, suggests a community-science study that compared the responses of dogs and pet pigs to the sound of humans crying and humming. The results were published on 2 July in Animal Behaviour1.

Humans pay attention to how the animals in their lives are feeling, and it seems that this attentiveness is reciprocal. Researchers have found that horses will stop and listen longer to human growls than to laughter2. Pigs respond more strongly to sounds made by people than wild boars do3.

But studies testing whether the animals are just reacting to weird human sounds, or are capable of true emotional contagion — the ability to interpret and reflect people’s emotional states — are thin on the ground. Most animals can accurately echo the feelings of only other members of their species. But studies have shown that dogs (Canis familiaris) can mirror the emotions of the people around them4,5.

One question is whether this emotional contagion is rooted in ‘universal vocal signals of emotion ’ that can be understood by all domesticated animals, or is specific to companion animals such as dogs. To test this, researchers compared the stress response of dogs and pet pigs (Sus scrofa domesticus) to human sounds.

Pet sounds

Like dogs, pet pigs are social animals that are from a young age raised around people. But unlike dogs, pigs have been kept as livestock for most of their history with humans. So, if emotional contagion can be learnt through just proximity to people, pet pigs should respond in similar ways to dogs.

The team recruited dog or pig owners around the world to film themselves in a room with their pets while playing recorded sounds of crying or humming. Researchers then tallied the number of stress behaviours — such as whining and yawning for dogs, and rapid ear flicks for pigs — exhibited during the experiment.