By Diana Kwon Charlene Sunkel was 19 when she started hearing voices and strange thoughts began filling her head. People wanted to infiltrate her mind, to poison her, to rat her out to the police. She stopped making eye contact, convinced that it would enable others to steal her thoughts. Once sociable and outgoing, Sunkel withdrew from friends and family, worried that they were conspiring against her. On her way to work, she had visions of men in hoods from the corner of her eye. As the illness progressed, she lost the ability to understand what people were saying, and when she spoke, the words would not come out right. About a year after her symptoms started, Sunkel was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Delusions, hallucinations and disordered thinking are collectively known as psychosis. These “positive” symptoms are among the most widely recognized aspects of schizophrenia. For about two thirds of patients with schizophrenia—which affects approximately 23 million people around the world—traditional antipsychotic drugs are often highly effective at treating psychosis. But these drugs frequently come with problematic side effects. And they do little to help with the so-called negative symptoms of schizophrenia, such as emotional flatness and social withdrawal, or with other issues involving thinking and memory referred to as cognitive problems. Until quite recently, all antipsychotics worked in essentially the same way. They blocked the activity of dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain involved in motivation, learning, habit formation, and other processes. The successful treatment of psychosis with dopamine blockers led many clinicians to believe that they understood schizophrenia and that its underlying cause was an imbalance in dopamine. When a particular antipsychotic did not work in a patient, all doctors needed to do, they thought, was up the dosage or try another dopamine-targeting drug. But the arrival last September of a new drug, KarXT, supports an emerging awareness among clinicians that schizophrenia is more complex than most of them had realized. KarXT is the first antipsychotic to target a molecule other than dopamine. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29711 - Posted: 03.19.2025

By Ellen Barry On a recent Friday morning, Daniel, a lawyer in his early 40s, was in a Zoom counseling session describing tapering off lithium. Earlier that week he had awakened with racing thoughts, so anxious that he could not read, and he counted the hours before sunrise. At those moments, Daniel doubted his decision to wean off the cocktail of psychiatric medications which had been part of his life since his senior year in high school, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Was this his body adjusting to the lower dosage? Was it a reaction to the taco seasoning he had eaten the night before? Or was it what his psychiatrist would have called it: a relapse? “It still does go to the place of — what if the doctors are right?” said Daniel. On his screen, Laura Delano nodded sympathetically. Ms. Delano is not a doctor; her main qualification, she likes to say, is having been “a professional psychiatric patient between the ages of 13 and 27.” During those years, when she attended Harvard and was a nationally ranked squash player, she was prescribed 19 psychiatric medications, often in combinations of three or four at a time. Then Ms. Delano decided to walk away from psychiatric care altogether, a journey she detailed in a new memoir, “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.” Fourteen years after taking her last psychotropic drug, Ms. Delano projects a radiant good health that also serves as her argument — living proof that, all along, her psychiatrists were wrong. Since then, to the alarm of some physicians, an online DIY subculture focused on quitting psychiatric medications has expanded and begun to mature into a service industry. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29710 - Posted: 03.19.2025

By Christina Caron Victoria Ratliff, the wealthy financier’s wife on season 3 of HBO’s “The White Lotus,” has a problem: She keeps popping pills. And her drug of choice, the anti-anxiety medication lorazepam, has left her a little loopy. In the show, which follows guests vacationing at a fictional resort, Victoria pairs her medication with wine, which leads her to nod off at the dinner table. Sometimes she slurs her words. When she notices that her pill supply is mysteriously dwindling, she asks her children if they’re stealing them. “You don’t have enough lorazepam to get through one week at a wellness spa?” her daughter, Piper, asks “The White Lotus” is not the only show to recently feature these drugs. The new Max series “The Pitt,” which takes place in an emergency department, includes a story line about a benzodiazepine called Librium. This isn’t a case of Hollywood taking dramatic liberties. Benzodiazepines such as lorazepam and chlordiazepoxide are notorious for having the potential to be highly addictive. They may also come with difficult — sometimes fatal — withdrawal symptoms. The characters’ misuse of benzodiazepine drugs is not uncommon, said Dr. Ian C. Neel, a geriatrician at UC San Diego Health. “We definitely see that a lot in real life as well.” And in recent years, he added, studies have shown that it’s a bigger problem than doctors initially realized. The drugs, which are often called benzos or downers, are commonly used to treat anxiety, panic attacks and sleep disorders like restless leg syndrome. But they can also be used for other reasons, such as to help people manage alcohol withdrawal. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 29705 - Posted: 03.15.2025

By Meghan Rosen and Laura Sanders Millions of Americans take antidepressants to help manage everything from depression and anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, the Trump administration has announced that these drugs, which have been in use for decades and gone through rigorous testing, will be subject to new scrutiny. Invoking a burden of chronic disease, including in children, the administration has pledged to, in its words, “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by” certain commonly prescribed medications. In the coming months, its “Make America Healthy Again” commission plans to review a slew of existing medications, including SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. More than 10 percent of U.S. adults took antidepressants over the previous 30 days, data from 2015 to 2018 show. And SSRIs are among the most widely prescribed of those drugs. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long questioned the safety of antidepressants and other psychiatric medicines, making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about the drugs. For instance, as recently as his January confirmation hearings, he likened taking SSRIs to having a heroin addiction. He also has suggested — without evidence — that SSRIs play a role in school shootings. With the executive order and statements like these, “it’s implied there is something nefarious or harmful” about antidepressants and related medications, says Lisa Fortuna, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents and Their Families. “People may think that they’re dangerous drugs.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29701 - Posted: 03.12.2025

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel Sign up for a clinical trial of a psychedelic drug and you’re agreeing to a potentially bizarre experience. “All of a sudden, your dead grandma or Satan is in front of you,” says psychiatrist Charles Raison of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Some think this consciousness-altering “trip” underlies the potential benefits of drugs such as psilocybin and LSD, which are under study to treat depression, trauma, chronic pain, and more. But the trip can also be a roadblock to assessing the drugs’ effects, making it near-impossible to conceal who is getting an active substance and who’s been assigned to placebo—a trial strategy called blinding that aims to keep participants’ expectations from skewing their response to a drug. This “functional unblinding” is not unique to psychedelics, but it’s especially pronounced in this drug class. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expressed concern about the issue in psychedelic trials. And it was among the critiques FDA advisers leveled at Lykos Therapeutics, whose application for MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) FDA rejected last summer. Now, scientists and companies are experimenting with trial designs meant to shield participants from recognizing what they’re getting, or to separate expectations from the drug’s impact on health. These include incorporating a range of doses; giving the drug, with permission, to people who are asleep; and misleading participants about how a trial is set up. Companies running large-scale psychedelic trials mostly view unblinding as inevitable. Participants “are going to feel” the drug, “that’s just how it is,” says Rob Barrow, CEO of MindMed, which has late-stage trials underway to test LSD’s ability to ease anxiety. But he believes there are ways to parse a drug’s efficacy even if people know they’re getting it. In one recent trial, MindMed recruited 198 people with anxiety, giving some a placebo and the others LSD at one of four doses. Virtually all who received active drug correctly guessed that they’d gotten it. But those on the two higher doses saw clinically meaningful reduced anxiety, whereas those on the lower doses didn’t. That split means the benefit “has to be due to something other than thinking you’re getting drug,” Barrow says. MindMed is using a lower, nontherapeutic dose as well as a higher dose in an ongoing phase 3 trial, and hopes to report results next year.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29691 - Posted: 03.05.2025

By Heidi Ledford A slimy barrier lining the brain’s blood vessels could hold the key to shielding the organ from the harmful effects of ageing, according to a study in mice. The study showed that this oozy barrier deteriorates with time, potentially allowing harmful molecules into brain tissue and sparking inflammatory responses. Gene therapy to restore the barrier reduced inflammation in the brain and improved learning and memory in aged mice. The work was published today in Nature1. The finding shines a spotlight on a cast of poorly understood molecules called mucins that coat the interior of blood vessels throughout the body and give mucus its slippery texture, says Carolyn Bertozzi, a Nobel-prizewinning chemist at Stanford University in California and a lead author of the study. “Mucins play a lot of interesting roles in the body,” she says. “But until recently, we didn’t have the tools to study them. They were invisible.” Snotty barrier Mucins are large proteins decorated with carbohydrates that form linkages with one another, creating a water-laden, gel-like substance. They are crucial constituents of the blood–brain barrier, a system that restricts the movement of some molecules from the blood into the brain. Researchers have long sought ways to sneak medicines past this barrier to treat diseases of the brain. Previous work also showed that the integrity of the barrier erodes with age2, suggesting that it could be an important target for therapies to combat diseases associated with ageing, such as Alzheimer’s disease. But scientists knew little about the contribution of mucins to these changes, until Sophia Shi, a graduate student at Stanford, decided to focus on a mucin-rich layer called the glycocalyx, which lines blood vessels. Shi and her colleagues looked at what happens to the glycocalyx in the brain as mice age. “The mucins on the young blood vessels were thick and juicy and plump,” says Bertozzi. “In the old mice, they were thin and lame and patchy.” © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 29688 - Posted: 03.01.2025

By Ellen Barry The Food and Drug Administration has taken a crucial step toward expanding access to the antipsychotic medication clozapine, the only drug approved for treatment-resistant schizophrenia, among the most devastating of mental illnesses. The agency announced on Monday that it was eliminating a requirement that patients submit blood tests before their prescriptions can be filled. Clozapine, which was approved in 1989, is regarded by many physicians as the most effective available treatment for schizophrenia, and research shows that the drug significantly reduces suicidal behavior. Clozapine is also associated with a rare side effect called neutropenia, a drop in white blood cell counts that, in its most severe form, can be life-threatening. In 2015, federal regulators imposed a regimen known as risk evaluation and mitigation strategies, or REMS, that required patients to submit to weekly, biweekly and monthly blood tests that had to be uploaded onto a database and verified by pharmacists. Physicians have long complained that, as a result, clozapine is grossly underutilized. Dr. Frederick C. Nucifora, director of the Adult Schizophrenia Clinic at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said he believed that around 30 percent of patients with schizophrenia would benefit from clozapine — far more than the 4 percent who currently take it. “I have had many patients who were doing terribly, who struggled to function outside the hospital, and cycled through many medications,” he said. “If they go on clozapine, they really tend to not be hospitalized again. I’ve had people go on to finish college and work. It’s quite remarkable.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29683 - Posted: 02.26.2025

By Moises Velasquez-Manoff When President Trump announced plans to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada, one of his stated rationales was to force those countries to curb the flow of fentanyl into the United States. In fiscal year 2024, United States Customs and Border Protection seized nearly 22,000 pounds of pills, powders and other products containing fentanyl, down from 27,000 pounds in the previous fiscal year. More than 105,000 people died from overdoses, three-quarters of them from fentanyl and other opioids, in 2023. It doesn’t take much illicit fentanyl — said to be about 50 times as powerful as heroin and 100 times as powerful as morphine — to cause a fatal overdose. In my article for the magazine, I note that one of the many tragedies of the opioid epidemic is that a proven treatment for opioid addiction, a drug called buprenorphine, has been available in the United States for more than two decades yet has been drastically underprescribed. Tens of thousands of lives might have been saved if it had been more widely used earlier. In his actions and rhetoric, Trump seems to emphasize the reduction of supply as the answer to the fentanyl crisis. But Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has pointed to American demand as a driver of the problem. Indeed, if enough opioid users in the United States ended up receiving buprenorphine and other effective medication-based treatments, perhaps that demand for illicit opioids like fentanyl could be reduced. Devastating losses. Drug overdose deaths, largely caused by the synthetic opioid drug fentanyl, reached record highs in the United States in 2021. Here’s what you should know to keep your loved ones safe: Understand fentanyl’s effects. Fentanyl is a potent and fast-acting drug, two qualities that also make it highly addictive. A small quantity goes a long way, so it’s easy to suffer an overdose. With fentanyl, there is only a short window of time to intervene and save a person’s life during an overdose. Stick to licensed pharmacies. Prescription drugs sold online or by unlicensed dealers marketed as OxyContin, Vicodin and Xanax are often laced with fentanyl. Only take pills that were prescribed by your doctor and came from a licensed pharmacy. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29677 - Posted: 02.19.2025

By Max Kozlov A sliver of human brain in a small vial starts to melt as lye is added to it. Over the next few days, the caustic chemical will break down the neurons and blood vessels within, leaving behind a grisly slurry containing thousands of tiny plastic particles. Toxicologist Matthew Campen has been using this method to isolate and track the microplastics — and their smaller counterparts, nanoplastics — found in human kidneys, livers and especially brains. Campen, who is at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, estimates that he can isolate about 10 grams of plastics from a donated human brain; that’s about the weight of an unused crayon. Microplastics have been found just about everywhere that scientists have looked: on remote islands, in fresh snow in Antarctica, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, in food, in water and in the air that we breathe. And scientists such as Campen are finding them spread throughout the human body. Detection is only the first step, however. Determining precisely what these plastics are doing inside people and whether they’re harmful has been much harder. That’s because there’s no one ‘microplastic’. They come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes and chemical compositions, each of which could affect cells and tissues differently. This is where Campen’s beige sludge comes into play. Despite microplastics’ ubiquity, it’s difficult to determine which microplastics people are exposed to, how they’re exposed and which particles make their way into the nooks and crannies of the body. The samples that Campen collects from cadavers can, in turn, be used to test how living tissues respond to the kinds of plastic that people carry around with them. “Morbidly speaking, the best source I can think of to get good, relevant microplastics is to take an entire human brain and digest it,” says Campen. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Robotics
Link ID: 29669 - Posted: 02.12.2025

By Laura Sanders So many of us struggle to fall asleep and stay there through the night. About a third of U.S. adults aren’t sleeping enough. Teenagers’ sleep is even worse; 8 in 10 teens are sleep deprived. Our collective exhaustion isn’t good for us. Lack of sleep can come with a range of health problems. Our immune systems, hormones, hearts — maybe all the body’s major systems — are influenced by sleep. In the brain, our memory, creativity and ability to learn are, too. But for something that’s so entwined with our health, the actual jobs of sleep are still, in many ways, a mystery. Scientists have tons of ideas: Perhaps sleep is for rifling through memories, picking out the important ones. Or maybe it’s a quiet, still time for growing bones in children. Or maybe it’s a time to let the brain loose on whatever problem vexed you that day. (One delightfully myopic theory posits that sleep, especially the rapid eye movement stage, is for squeezing fluid around the eye to keep it lubricated.) Figuring out why we sleep has puzzled scientists for as long as the question has existed. It’s like following hundreds of disappearing breadcrumbs on paths through a forest of trees that keep shifting spots, only to realize you’re standing alone in only your underwear. Oh, and you forgot to study for the test. Given this hazy scientific landscape, it’s no surprise that efforts to help the sleep-deprived catch some z’s might fall short or have unintended consequences. That’s clear from a new study of the sleep medicine zolpidem. Zolpidem, sold as Ambien, messes with yet another possible job of sleep – housekeeping. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29663 - Posted: 02.08.2025

By Andrew Jacobs and Rachel Nuwer After more than three decades of planning and a $250 million investment, Lykos Therapeutics’ application for the first psychedelic drug to reach federal regulators was expected to be a shoo-in. Lykos, the corporate arm of a nonprofit dedicated to winning mainstream acceptance of psychedelics, had submitted data to the Food and Drug Administration showing that its groundbreaking treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder — MDMA plus talk therapy — was significantly more effective than existing treatments. At a pivotal public hearing last summer, two dozen scientists, doctors and trauma survivors told an F.D.A. advisory panel how MDMA-assisted therapy had brought marked relief from a mental health condition associated with high rates of suicide, especially among veterans. Then came skeptics with disturbing accusations: that Lykos was “a therapy cult,” that practitioners in its clinical trials had engaged in widespread abuse of participants and that the company had concealed a litany of adverse events. “The most significant harms in Lykos’s clinical trials were not caused by MDMA, but by the people who were entrusted to supervise its administration,” Neşe Devenot, one of the speakers opposed to Lykos’s treatment and a writing instructor at Johns Hopkins University, told the committee. Dr. Devenot and six others presented themselves as experts in the field of psychedelics, but none had expertise in medicine or therapy. Nor had the speakers disclosed their connection to Psymposia, a leftist advocacy group whose members oppose the commercialization of psychedelics and had been campaigning against Lykos and its nonprofit parent, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. The critics did not provide evidence to back their claims of systematic wrongdoing, but when the votes were counted that day, the panel overwhelmingly rejected Lykos’s application. Before voting, panelists cited a number of concerns, among them MDMA’s potential effects on the heart and liver, and whether trial results were influenced by the fact that most study participants correctly guessed they had received the drug and not a placebo. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29659 - Posted: 02.05.2025

Damian Carrington Environment editor The exponential rise in microplastic pollution over the past 50 years may be reflected in increasing contamination in human brains, according to a new study. It found a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024. The researchers also found the tiny particles in liver and kidney samples. The human body is widely contaminated by microplastics. They have also been found in blood, semen, breast milk, placentas and bone marrow. The impact on human health is largely unknown, but they have been linked to strokes and heart attacks. The scientists also found that the concentration of microplastics was about six times higher in brain samples from people who had dementia. However, the damage dementia causes in the brain would be expected to increase concentrations, the researchers said, meaning no causal link should be assumed. “Given the exponentially rising environmental presence of micro- and nanoplastics, this data compels a much larger effort to understand whether they have a role in neurological disorders or other human health effects,” said the researchers, who were led by Prof Matthew Campen at the University of New Mexico in the US. Microplastics are broken down from plastic waste and have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans. People consume the tiny particles via food, water and by breathing them in. A study published on Thursday found tiny plastic pollution to be significantly higher in placentas from premature births. Another recent analysis found that microplastics can block blood vessels in the brains of mice, causing neurological damage, but noted that human capillaries are much larger. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 29656 - Posted: 02.05.2025

By Gina Kolata The Food and Drug Administration approved a new medication Thursday to treat pain from an injury or surgery. It is expensive, with a list price of $15.50 per pill. But unlike opioid pain medicines, it cannot become addictive. That is because the drug, suzetrigine, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and to be sold as Journavx, works only on nerves outside the brain, blocking pain signals. It cannot get into the brain. Researchers say they expect it to be the first of a new generation of more powerful nonaddictive drugs to relieve pain. To test the drug, Vertex, which is based in Boston, conducted two large clinical trials, each with approximately 1,000 patients who had pain from surgery. They were randomly assigned to get a placebo; to get the opioid sold as Vicodin, a widely used combination pain medicine of acetaminophen (Tylenol) and hydrocodone; or to get suzetrigine. In one trial, patients had an abdominoplasty, or tummy tuck. In the other, they had a bunionectomy. Side effects of suzetrigine reported by patients were similar to the ones reported by those taking the placebo. The company also submitted data from a 250-person study that assessed the drug’s safety and tolerability in patients with pain from surgery, trauma or accidents. Suzetrigine eased pain as much as the combination opioid. Both were better than the placebo at relieving pain. Suzetrigine’s price, though, is much higher than that of acetaminophen plus hydrocodone. Patients are expected to take two pills a day, for a total cost of $31 a day. The older drug, said Dr. John D. Loeser, an emeritus pain expert at the University of Washington, is “dirt cheap” at pennies per pill. But suzetrigine does not have opioids’ unpleasant side effects like nausea and drowsiness, and it is nonaddictive. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29653 - Posted: 02.01.2025

By Katie J.M. BakerMegan TwoheyDanielle Ivory and Jeremy Singer-Vine At Stiiizy, the best-selling cannabis brand in America, the goal is explicit: producing powerful and cheap marijuana. Inside its Los Angeles headquarters, crews dust joints with concentrated THC, the intoxicating component of cannabis. They package pocket-size vape cartridges that promise “the highest potency possible.” On its website, the company declares that “it has never been easier (or quicker) to get silly high for an affordable price.” Dispensaries operating under the brand of another leading company, Cookies, have promoted “powerful medical benefits,” including “cancer fighting” qualities. A cannabis-infused chocolate bar was, until recently, described as containing properties “beneficial to those suffering” from glaucoma, bacterial infections and Huntington’s disease, a devastating genetic illness. More than a decade after states began legalizing recreational marijuana, businesses are enticing customers with unproven health claims, while largely escaping rigorous oversight. A New York Times review of 20 of the largest brands found that most were selling products with such claims, potentially violating federal and state regulations. And as companies compete, potency has gone up — with some products advertised as having as much as 99 percent THC — and prices have gone down. “What we’re seeing is really a race to the bottom,” said Matt Zehner, a senior analyst at Brightfield Group, which tracks the legal cannabis industry. Some executives said their companies are trying to navigate complex rules while satisfying their customers. Stiiizy’s co-founder and chief executive, James Kim, said in an interview that many are heavy users in search of a good deal, something he had sought as a broke “pothead” in his early 20s. “This is why I believe we’re very successful,” he said. But in a $32 billion industry that has been volatile — only about a quarter of businesses turned a profit last year, one survey found — companies say they also face pressure to do whatever they can to survive. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29647 - Posted: 01.29.2025

By Ellen Barry A study of more than 30,000 British adults diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D., found that, on average, they were dying earlier than their counterparts in the general population — around seven years earlier for men, and around nine for women. The study, which was published Thursday in The British Journal of Psychiatry, is believed to be the first to use all-cause mortality data to estimate life expectancy in people with A.D.H.D. Previous studies have pointed to an array of risks associated with the condition, among them poverty, mental health disorders, smoking and substance abuse. The authors cautioned that A.D.H.D. is substantially underdiagnosed and that the people in their study — most of them diagnosed as young adults — might be among the more severely affected. Still, they described their findings as “extremely concerning,” highlighting unmet needs that “require urgent attention.” “It’s a big number, and it is worrying,” said Joshua Stott, a professor of aging and clinical psychology at University College London and an author of the study. “I see it as likely to be more about health inequality than anything else. But it’s quite a big health inequality.” The study did not identify causes of early death among people with A.D.H.D. but found that they were twice as likely as the general population to smoke or abuse alcohol and that they had far higher rates of autism, self-harming behaviors and personality disorders than the general population. In adulthood, Dr. Stott said, “they find it harder to manage impulses, and have more risky behaviors.” He said health care systems might need to adjust in order to better serve people with A.D.H.D., who may have sensory sensitivity or difficulty managing time or communicating with clinicians during brief appointments. He said he hoped treatments for substance abuse or depression could be adapted for patients with A.D.H.D. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ADHD; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29643 - Posted: 01.25.2025

By Aimee Cunningham If cigarettes contained very little of the chemical that keeps people smoking, it could help smokers move away from these deadly products. That’s the rationale behind a new rule proposed on January 15 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which seeks to limit the amount of the addictive chemical nicotine in cigarettes. The reduced-nicotine cigarettes would have less than 5 percent of the amount of nicotine that’s generally found in regular cigarettes. The rule would also cap the nicotine in certain other products in which the tobacco leaves are burned. The FDA rule is just one step toward reduced-nicotine cigarettes and other combusted tobacco products becoming the standard. This process would probably take many years, depending on the priorities of future administrations and whether the tobacco industry challenges the rule in court, as it has the FDA’s rule placing graphic warning labels on their products. The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control gave the FDA the authority to require graphic warning labels and to reduce nicotine in tobacco products. The idea for a nicotine limit has been around for decades. And the evidence supporting drastically lowering the amount of nicotine in combusted tobacco products has grown during that time. Randomized controlled trials of reduced-nicotine cigarettes report that people using them end up smoking fewer cigarettes per day. That’s also the case for studies that focused on groups at higher risk for smoking, including people who are socioeconomically disadvantaged and people with mental health conditions. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29632 - Posted: 01.18.2025

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent A powerful psychedelic that is used in healing ceremonies by Indigenous groups in the Amazon is being trialled as a pioneering approach to reduce problematic alcohol consumption. Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is the active ingredient in ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic brew that has been used for thousands of years by shamans in South America. Scientists based at University College London are testing whether a one-off dose of the drug could help hazardous drinkers who want to reduce their alcohol intake. Alcohol addiction is notoriously difficult to overcome and there are few effective therapies available. “The current treatments really don’t work for a large proportion of people. For alcohol addiction, 50% of people relapse within three months and around 60-70% within three years,” said Prof Ravi Das, who is co-leading the trial at University College London with Prof Jeremy Skipper. “Treatment itself hasn’t changed fundamentally in 70 years, so there’s a desperate need for new drugs and treatment approaches. To the extent that DMT might provide a more effective treatment approach, it is worth exploring.” In its pure form, DMT is one of the most powerful psychoactive substances found in nature. “The dose we chose reliably produces strong effects,” said Dr Greg Cooper, a research fellow at UCL, adding that this included total out-of-body experiences, fully immersive hallucinations and entering colourful geometric landscapes. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29631 - Posted: 01.18.2025

By Apoorva Mandavilli The snake struck 11-year-old Beatrice Ndanu Munyoki as she sat on a small stone, which lay atop a larger one, watching the family’s eight goats. She was idly running her fingers through the dirt when she saw a red head dart from between the stones and felt a sharp sting on her right index finger. Never a crier, she ran to her father, David Mutunga, who was building a fence. He cut the cloth belt on her dress into strips with a machete, tied her arm in three places and rushed her to a hospital 30 minutes away on a motorcycle taxi. As the day stretched on, her finger grew darker, but the hospital in Mwingi, a small town in Kenya, had no antidote for that kind of venom. Finally that evening in November 2023, she was taken by ambulance to another hospital and injected with antivenom. When the finger blistered, swelled and turned black despite a second dose the next day, “I understood that they will now remove that part,” Mr. Mutunga said with tears in his eyes. Beatrice’s finger was amputated. In Kenya, India, Brazil and dozens of other countries, snakes vie for the same land, water and sometimes food as people, with devastating consequences. Deforestation, human sprawl and climate change are exacerbating the problem. According to official estimates, about five million people are bitten by snakes each year. About 120,000 die, and some 400,000 lose limbs to amputation. The real toll is almost certainly much higher. Estimates are generally based on hospital records, but most snakebites occur in rural areas, far from dispensaries that stock antivenom and among people too poor to afford treatment. “We don’t actually know the burden of snakebite for most countries of the world,” said Nicholas Casewell, a snake researcher at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Neurotoxins
Link ID: 29621 - Posted: 01.08.2025

Jon Hamilton A single dose of the anesthetic ketamine can provide weeks of relief from severe depression. One reason may be that the drug causes long-term changes to a brain circuit involved in "giving up," a team reports in the journal Neuron. The team found that in zebrafish, ketamine alters this circuit in a way that causes the fish to persevere in the face of adversity rather than becoming passive. This resilience appears linked to brain cells called astrocytes, which play a central role in the "giving up" circuit. "Something happens within those cells that changes their response" to adversity, says Misha Ahrens, an author of the study and a senior group leader at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus. "We don't know what that is yet." But if scientists can figure it out, they might be able to develop more effective versions of ketamine and other psychiatric drugs, Ahrens says. The research involved the larval zebrafish, which is smaller than a grain of rice and looks like a tadpole. "It's transparent, so you can basically see what's going on in the entire brain all at once," says Alex Chen of Harvard University, another member of the team. For the experiment, the fish had to be kept stationary so scientists could monitor its brain. "But we still want it to feel like it's swimming through a virtual world," Chen says. The team did this by projecting images indicating forward movement when the animal swished its tail. Then they switched to images showing no progress, no matter what the fish did. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29617 - Posted: 01.08.2025

By Roni Caryn Rabin Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of cancer, and alcoholic beverages should carry a warning label as packs of cigarettes do, the U.S. surgeon general said on Friday. It is the latest salvo in a fierce debate about the risks and benefits of moderate drinking as the influential U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans are about to be updated. For decades, moderate drinking was said to help prevent heart attacks and strokes. That perception has been embedded in the dietary advice given to Americans. But growing research has linked drinking, sometimes even within the recommended limits, to various types of cancer. Labels currently affixed to bottles and cans of alcoholic beverages warn about drinking while pregnant or before driving and operating other machinery, and about general “health risks.” But alcohol directly contributes to 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 related deaths each year, the surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said. He called for updating the labels to include a heightened risk of breast cancer, colon cancer and at least five other malignancies now linked by scientific studies to alcohol consumption. “Many people out there assume that as long as they’re drinking at the limits or below the limits of current guidelines of one a day for women and two for men, that there is no risk to their health or well-being,” Dr. Murthy said in an interview. “The data does not bear that out for cancer risk.” Only Congress can mandate new warning labels of the sort Dr. Murthy recommended, and it’s not clear that the incoming administration would support the change. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29612 - Posted: 01.04.2025