Alison Abbott The two major neuroscience societies in the United States and Europe have joined forces to criticize the prestigious Max Planck Society (MPS) in Germany for its treatment of a world-renowned neuroscientist targeted by animal-rights activists. Nikos Logothetis, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (MPI-Biocyb) in Tübingen who used to run a primate laboratory, has been charged with mistreatment of animals after allegations made by animal-rights groups. When Logothetis was indicted in February, the MPS removed many of his responsibilities relating to animal research — despite the fact that a court has not yet ruled on those charges. Logothetis, who studies how the brain makes sense of the world, denies the allegations. In a strongly worded statement posted online on 3 August, the US Society for Neuroscience (SfN) and the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS), which together represent more than 60,000 scientists, add to an outcry that has been gathering momentum since scientists at MPI-Biocyb made their concerns public in May. “FENS and SfN are extremely dismayed by the treatment of Professor Nikos Logothetis and his colleagues,” reads the joint statement. The MPS's actions set "an alarming precedent whereby institutions neglect to support affiliated scientists facing similar unproven accusations and disregard the presumption of innocence”, adds the statement. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 25309 - Posted: 08.08.2018

Laura Sanders A career of hard hits to the head doesn’t inevitably lead to brain decline, a small study of former football and hockey pros suggests. The results counter a specter raised by other studies on pro football players’ brains after death. The new findings come from extensive brain scans and behavioral tests of 21 retired athletes — football players from New York’s Buffalo Bills and hockey players from the Buffalo Sabres. In a series of papers published August 7 in the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, researchers report finding no signs among the athletes of early dementia or mental slipping. Those symptoms are early hallmarks of the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, which can be diagnosed by a brain examination only after death. Such studies involving living subjects “are exactly what we really need,” says cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist Carrie Esopenko of Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. “They are really going to help us understand what’s going on in these lives, rather than what’s happening when they’re dead.” Using a battery of clinical tests, researchers at the University at Buffalo measured brain function and mental health, while also investigating other aspects of the ex-players’ health, such as diet, body mass index and history of drug and alcohol use. The team then compared the results with the same measures taken for 21 noncontact athletes, including runners and cyclists. Participating football players and hockey players expected bad news. They “were pretty much their own worst critics,” believing themselves to be impaired, says coauthor and psychiatrist Barry Willer. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 25308 - Posted: 08.08.2018

Kelsey Tyssowski The first dance at my wedding lasted exactly four minutes and 52 seconds, but I’ll probably remember it for decades. Neuroscientists still don’t entirely understand this: How was my brain able to translate this less-than-five-minute experience into a lifelong memory? Part of the puzzle is that there’s a gap between experience and memory: our experiences are fleeting, but it takes hours to form a long-term memory. In recent work published in the journal Neuron, my colleagues and I figured out how the brain keeps temporary molecular records of transient experiences. Our finding not only helps to explain how the brain bridges the gap between experience and memory. It also allows us to read the brain’s short-term records, raising the possibility that we may one day be able to infer a person’s, or at least a laboratory mouse’s, past experience – what they saw, thought, felt – just by looking at the molecules in their brain. To uncover how the brain keeps track of an animal’s experience, we started by asking how the brain records its electrical activity. Every experience you have, from chatting with a friend to smelling french fries, corresponds to its own unique pattern of electrical activity in the nervous system and brain. These activity patterns are defined by which neurons are active and in what way they’re active. For example, say you’re at the gym lifting weights. Which neurons are active is fairly straightforward: If you’re lifting with your right arm, different neurons will be active than if you’re lifting with your left arm because different neurons are connected to the muscles of each arm. © 2010–2018, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25307 - Posted: 08.08.2018

Sukanya Charuchandra R. Liu et al., “Perception of social interaction compresses subjective duration in an oxytocin-dependent manner,” eLife, 7:e32100, 2018. External stimuli can affect our perception of time. Researchers in China set out to test whether a person’s social skills and perception of social interactions alters their sense of time. Subjects viewed two motion sequences depicting two humans composed of dots of light. The first video clip showed sociable behavior between the figures, such as passing an object, while the second showed no interaction—the figures moved independently of each other. The subjects had to indicate which clip appeared to last longer. Overall, volunteers found the clips with communicative behavior to be shorter, even when that wasn’t true. This “temporal compression effect” was not as pronounced in less sociable test subjects, as measured by their Autism Spectrum Quotient, a questionnaire-based assessment that determines where people fall on the neurotypical or autistic scale. “It not only highlights the idiosyncrasy of subjective time but also demonstrates that our perception of the world (something as basic as time) is ingrained with our personality traits,” writes coauthor Wen Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Psychology in an email to The Scientist. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Autism
Link ID: 25306 - Posted: 08.08.2018

Sarah Boseley Health editor Ritalin and other drugs of the same class are the most effective and safest medications to prescribe for children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a major scientific review. The review of ADHD drugs shows that they work, and work well, in spite of concerns among the public and some doctors that children in the UK are being overmedicated. Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, has likened the drugs to a “chemical cosh” and claimed they were being overprescribed, disguising bad behaviour among children that could be better dealt with. The authors of a major study in the Lancet Psychiatry journal say that methylphenidate, of which Ritalin is the best-known brand, is the most effective and best-tolerated treatment for children while amphetamines work best for adults. While the number of children on medication has risen as ADHD has become better understood, many do not get the treatment they need to cope in life and get through school, they said. The Guardian has revealed that getting help in the UK can take as long as two years. Emily Simonoff, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at King’s College London, one of the authors, said the perception that children were overmedicated was not accurate. “Clinicians are very cautious about using medication in this country,” she said. “The problem in the UK is predominantly about undermedication and underdiagnosis.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: ADHD
Link ID: 25305 - Posted: 08.08.2018

By Bilal Choudhry Killifish are a family of freshwater fish that have evolved to survive in the most difficult of situations. Here in the United States, for instance, the Atlantic killifish is known for having adapted to live in heavily polluted places like the Lower Passaic River. But in small murky puddles that come after heavy rains in parts of East Africa, another killifish, called Nothobranchius furzeri, or the African annual fish, has developed its own unique adaptations to its environment. Its embryos are able to enter a state of diapause, similar to hibernation in bears, when conditions aren’t right. It turns out that entering dormancy isn’t the only thing that’s unusual about this African killifish. In a paper published on Monday in Current Biology, a team of Czech researchers report that N. furzeri has the quickest known rate of sexual maturity of any vertebrate — approximately two weeks. By studying the fish’s unusual life cycle, they hope to gain insights into the process of aging in other vertebrates, including us. Dr. Martin Reichard, a biologist who is studying the evolution of aging at the Czech Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Biology, led a team of colleagues to Mozambique to study the fish’s developmental stages in the wild. There, they were able to observe embryos buried in the sand that had entered a dormant state. They also documented their maturation after rainfall. When N. furzeri receive cues from their environment, they can be flexible in sexual development. Under these circumstances, their embryos enter a stage of dormancy called embryonic diapause, a reproductive strategy that extends their gestational period and helps them survive unfavorable conditions, like a dry season. But when it rains, they undergo rapid growth, going from juvenile fish to mature adults that are able to reproduce in about two weeks. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 25304 - Posted: 08.07.2018

Ina Jaffe The antipsychotic drug Seroquel was approved by the FDA years ago to help people with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses. But too frequently the drug is also given to people who have Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. The problem with that? Seroquel can be deadly for dementia patients, according to the FDA. Now some researchers have conducted an experiment that convinced some of the general practice doctors who prescribe Seroquel most frequently to cut back. All the scientists did was have Medicare send letters — three of them over the course of six months — to the roughly 5,000 general practitioners who prescribe Seroquel the most. The letters (attached to this document) had two elements: First there was a peer comparison aspect. The doctors who got the letters were told that they wrote a lot more prescriptions for Seroquel than the average for their state — in some cases as many as 8 times more. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services which regulates Medicare, was a partner in the study and sent the letters. So the in addition to peer pressure, they contained a government warning: "You have been flagged as a markedly unusual prescriber, subject to review by the Center for Program Integrity." Researchers then tracked the physicians' prescribing habits for two years. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25303 - Posted: 08.07.2018

Sleeping longer than the recommended seven or eight hours a night has been linked with a higher risk of premature death, according to new research. Researchers looked at data from 74 studies involving more than three million people and found those who slept for 10 hours were 30% more likely to die prematurely than those who slept for eight. Staying in bed for more than 10 hours was also linked to a 56% increased risk of death from stroke and a 49% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Poor sleep quality was associated with a 44% increase in risk of coronary heart disease, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers said their study suggests abnormal sleep could be “a marker of elevated cardiovascular risk” and said GPs ought to ask questions about sleeping patterns during appointments. Lead researcher Dr Chun Shing Kwok, of Keele University’s Institute for Science and Technology in Medicine, said: “Abnormal sleep is a marker of elevated cardiovascular risk and greater consideration should be given in exploring both duration and sleep quality during patient consultations. “There are cultural, social, psychological, behavioural, pathophysiological and environmental influences on our sleep such as the need to care for children or family members, irregular working shift patterns, physical or mental illness, and the 24-hour availability of commodities in modern society.” © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25302 - Posted: 08.07.2018

By Emily Willingham Celebrity plays a role in increasing public awareness of Parkinson’s disease—and drums up funding. A foundation named after actor Michael J. Fox is the largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson’s research. Another actor, Alan Alda, generated global news coverage with his recent announcement that he received a diagnosis more than three years ago. Tech titan Sergey Brin carries a version of a gene that greatly increases risk for Parkinson’s (PD), but the gene has an unwieldy name that few would otherwise recognize. These high-profile associations call attention to PD and its causes, including mutations like the one Brin carries. A handful of gene mutations are linked to inherited PD, but they account for less than 15 percent of the one million U.S. cases and the five million worldwide. The most common of these is a mutated version of leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 (LRRK2), the one Brin carries. It is responsible for one to two percent of PD cases, but the percentage is much higher in certain groups, including those with Ashkenazi Jewish or Basque ancestry. LRRK2 has drawn the interest of pharmaceutical companies because it is an accessible drug target. The gene encodes a namesake protein that functions as a a type of enzyme called a kinase. The LRRK2 protein attaches chemical tags called phosphates to other proteins. Like a molecular switch, these phosphate tags activate or silence LRRK2’s targets. Dozens of drugs that inhibit the activity of kinases have been approved in the last 30 years, primarily for cancer. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Parkinsons
Link ID: 25301 - Posted: 08.07.2018

By Victoria Davis An elephant’s trunk is the Swiss army knife of appendages: It’s used to breathe, communicate, and even lift objects. Now, a new study finds another use—sniffing out food across long distances. Researchers have long known that elephants and other plant-eating mammals seek their supper with their eyes. But scientists at the Adventures with Elephants facility near Bela Bela, South Africa, wanted to know whether they could do the same thing with their trunks. So they collected 11 plants eaten by wild African elephants (Loxodonta africana), six of which the animals loved and five of which were not nearly as appealing. In one experiment, the elephants had to use their sense of smell to choose between two small samples of plants concealed in black plastic bins. The elephants tended to pick “preferred” plants when the other option was a nonpreferred species, but they had a harder time choosing if both plants were either “preferred” or “nonpreferred.” In a second experiment, the elephants were put into a Y-shaped maze, with a different plant at each end of two 7-meter-long arms. In this formulation, they always chose the preferred plant over the less desired species, the researchers report in Animal Behavior. They were even able to differentiate between plants that fell closely together on the love-hate scale. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 25300 - Posted: 08.07.2018

By Susana Martinez-Conde The house cricket (Acheta domesticus) walked around the arena comfortably, certain of its surroundings. It looked about, perhaps hoping for food or mates, ignoring the scattered, browning, dead leaves. On previous visits to the arena, the cricket had been wary of the dead leaves, not knowing what to make of them. Then, after a prudent interval, it had ventured to feel them with its segmented antennae—tentatively at first, and later with growing confidence. Once the cricket determined the leaves were neither edible nor harmful, it quickly lost interest in them. Now it rarely bothered to explore the leaves, but took no great pains to avoid them either. The cricket’s conviction about the safety of the leaves was its fatal mistake: on this visit, one seemingly dead leaf lying on the arena was no such, but a masquerading ghost mantis (Phyllocrania paradoxa) waiting in ambush. Unaware of the concealed peril, the cricket drew ever closer to the predator. That’s when the mantis struck forth, grasping the cricket by one of its long jumping legs. As the cricket struggled against the mantis’ clutch, the predator started to feed. Dr John Skelhorn, Lecturer in Animal Cognition, has witnessed dozens of similar life-and-death encounters in his lab at Newcastle University’s Institute of Neuroscience. Skelhorn and his colleagues previously found that some animals masquerade as inanimate, inedible objects, to look less appealing to potential predators. Some examples include the orb web spider (Cyclosa ginnaga) and the larva of the giant swallowtail butterfly (Papilio cresphontes), both of which masquerade as bird droppings, and the larva of the feathered thorn moth (Selenia dentaria), which masquerades as a twig. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 25299 - Posted: 08.06.2018

By Pagan Kennedy Nearly 30 years ago, the author William Styron outed himself in these pages as mentally ill. “My days were pervaded by a gray drizzle of unrelenting horror,” he wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article, describing the deep depression that had landed him in the psych ward. He compared the agony of mental illness to that of a heart attack. Pain is pain, whether it’s in the mind or the body. So why, he asked, were depressed people treated as pariahs? A confession of mental illness might not seem like a big deal now, but it was back then. In the 1980s, “if you were depressed, it was a terrible dark secret that you hid from the world,” according to Andrew Solomon, a historian of mental illness and author of “The Noonday Demon.” “People with depression were seen as pathetic and even dangerous. You didn’t let them near your kids.” “In the popular mind, suicide is usually the work of a coward or sometimes, paradoxically, a deed of great courage, but it is neither; the torment that precipitates the act makes it often one of blind necessity.” The response to Mr. Styron’s op-ed was immediate. Letters flooded into The New York Times. The readers thanked him, blurted out their stories and begged him for more. “Inadvertently I had helped unlock a closet from which many souls were eager to come out,” Mr. Styron wrote later. “It was like the #MeToo movement,” Alexandra Styron, the author’s daughter, told me. “Somebody comes out and says: ‘This happened. This is real. This is what it feels like.’ And it just unleashed the floodgates.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 25298 - Posted: 08.06.2018

By Susan Schneider As you read this, it feels like something to be you. You are seeing these words on the page and hearing the world around you, for instance. And all these thoughts and sensations come together into your conscious “now.” Consciousness is this felt quality of experience. Without consciousness, there would be no enjoyment of a beautiful sunset. Nor would there be suffering. Experience, positive or negative, simply wouldn’t exist. At the heart of current theorizing about consciousness in philosophy is the hard problem of consciousness, a puzzle raised by the philosopher David Chalmers. (See his Scientific American article “The Puzzle of Conscious Experience.”) Cognitive science says that the brain is an information processing engine. The hard problem asks: but why does all this sophisticated information processing need to feel like anything, from the inside? Why do we have experience? One influential approach to the problem, endorsed by Chalmers himself, is panpsychism. Panpsychism holds that even the smallest layers of reality have experience. Fundamental particles have minute levels of consciousness, and in a watered-down sense, they are subjects of experience. When particles are in extremely sophisticated configurations, such as when they are in nervous systems, more sophisticated forms of consciousness arise. Panpsychism aims to locate the building blocks of reality in the most basic layer of reality identified by a completed physics. Indeed, panpsychists claim that it is a virtue of their theory that it meshes with fundamental physics, for experience is the underlying nature of the properties that physics identifies. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25297 - Posted: 08.06.2018

Lesley Mcclurg The first prescription medication extracted from the marijuana plant is poised to land on pharmacists' shelves this fall. Epidiolex, made from purified cannabidiol, or CBD, a compound found in the cannabis plant, is approved for two rare types of epilepsy. Its journey to market was driven forward by one family's quest to find a treatment for their son's epilepsy. Scientific and public interest in CBD had been percolating for several years before the Food and Drug Administration finally approved Epidiolex in June. But CBD — which doesn't cause the mind-altering high that comes from THC, the primary psychoactive component of marijuana — was hard to study, because of tight restrictions on using cannabis in research. Sam Vogelstein's family and his doctors found ways to work around those restrictions in their fight to control his seizures. Sam's seizures started in 2005 when he was four years old. It's a moment his mother, Evelyn Nussenbaum, will never forget. The family was saying goodbye to a dinner guest when Sam's face suddenly slackened and he fell forward at the waist. Article continues after sponsorship "He did something that looked like a judo bow after a match," says Nussenbaum. Two months passed before Sam had another seizure, but then he started having them every week. Eventually he was suffering through 100 seizures a day. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Epilepsy; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25296 - Posted: 08.06.2018

Frances Perraudin Deaths caused by the drug fentanyl rose by nearly 30% last year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. While statistics show that the rate of deaths from drug poisoning in England and Wales has remained steady – 66.1 deaths per 1 million people (3,756 deaths) – fatalities involving the synthetic opioid fentanyl were up 29%. There were 75 deaths in 2017, up from 58 deaths in 2016. Fentanyl has been found mixed with street heroin, causing accidental overdose in users. The drug can up to 100 times stronger than heroin and is sometimes prescribed as a painkiller for the terminally ill. One type of fentanyl, carfentanyl, is 10,000 times stronger and is used as an elephant tranquilliser. It was first seen mentioned in death certificates in 2017 and accounted for 27 deaths, 87% of the 31 deaths related to types of fentanyl in 2017. In April 2017, after a spate of deaths linked to fentanyl in northern England, Public Health England issued a warning to heroin users to be extra careful when using the drug, urging them to test a small amount first and not to take it alone. The ONS statistics also show that deaths from cocaine were up for the sixth year in a row. There were 432 deaths related to the drug in 2017, compared with 371 deaths in 2016. In June a report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) found that purity of street cocaine across Europe was at its highest level in a decade and the number of people seeking treatment for use of the drug was on the rise. © 2018 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25295 - Posted: 08.06.2018

By Elizabeth Gamillo Conservationists trying to restore the United States’s grasslands kept running into a problem: As soon as they planted the seeds meant to bring back native flora, hungry mice would gobble them up. In an effort to deter the rodents, biologists tried coating the seeds with capsaicin, the active ingredient that gives chili peppers their signature fiery taste. It worked: Dusting the seeds with chili powder reduced the number of seeds consumed by deer mice by 86%, researchers report in Restoration Ecology. The hot discovery required some trial and error. One big challenge was finding a chili powder that would deter the mice but not prevent the seeds from germinating. Another was finding a coating that wouldn’t weather away after a few months outdoors. After 4 years of laboratory and field experiments in Montana’s Missoula Valley, researchers found a workable recipe. A powder made from the Bhut jolokia, or ghost pepper, from India—considered to be one of the world’s hottest chilis—did the trick. The scientists suggest their findings demonstrate how nontoxic, natural plant defense compounds—such as capsaicin—can be used to aid restoration efforts. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25294 - Posted: 08.06.2018

Tina Hesman Saey Humans’ gift of gab probably wasn’t the evolutionary boon that scientists once thought. There’s no evidence that FOXP2, sometimes called “the language gene,” gave humans such a big evolutionary advantage that it was quickly adopted across the species, what scientists call a selective sweep. That finding, reported online August 2 in Cell, follows years of debate about the role of FOXP2 in human evolution. In 2002, the gene became famous when researchers thought they had found evidence that a tweak in FOXP2 spread quickly to all humans — and only humans — about 200,000 years ago. That tweak swapped two amino acids in the human version of the gene for ones different than in other animals’ versions of the gene. FOXP2 is involved in vocal learning in songbirds, and people with mutations in the gene have speech and language problems. Many researchers initially thought that the amino acid swap was what enabled humans to speak. Speech would have given humans a leg up on competition from Neandertals and other ancient hominids. That view helped make FOXP2 a textbook example of selective sweeps. Some researchers even suggested that FOXP2 was the gene that defines humans, until it became clear that the gene did not allow humans to settle the world and replace other hominids, says archeaogeneticist Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who was not involved in the study. “It was not the one gene to rule them all.” |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25293 - Posted: 08.04.2018

Matthew Warren The evolution of human language was once thought to have hinged on changes to a single gene that were so beneficial that they raced through ancient human populations. But an analysis now suggests that this gene, FOXP2, did not undergo changes in Homo sapiens’ recent history after all — and that previous findings might simply have been false signals. “The situation’s a lot more complicated than the very clean story that has been making it into textbooks all this time,” says Elizabeth Atkinson, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the paper, which was published on 2 August in Cell1. Originally discovered in a family who had a history of profound speech and language disorders, FOXP2 was the first gene found to be involved in language production2. Later research touted its importance to the evolution of human language. A key 2002 paper found that humans carry two mutations to FOXP2 not found in any other primates3. When the researchers looked at genetic variation surrounding these mutations, they found the signature of a ‘selective sweep’ — in which a beneficial mutation quickly becomes common across a population. This change to FOXP2 seemed to have happened in the past 200,000 years, the team reported in Nature. The paper has been cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature. © 2018 Springer Nature Limited.

Keyword: Language; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25292 - Posted: 08.04.2018

By Emily Baumgaertner WASHINGTON — A fast-acting class of fentanyl drugs approved only for cancer patients with high opioid tolerance has been prescribed frequently to patients with back pain and migraines, putting them at high risk of accidental overdose and death, according to documents collected by the Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. established a distribution oversight program in 2011 to curb inappropriate use of the dangerous medications, but entrusted enforcement to a group of pharmaceutical companies that make and sell the drugs. Some of the companies have been sued for illegally promoting other uses for the medications and in one case even bribing doctors to prescribe higher doses. About 5,000 pages of documents, obtained by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health through the Freedom of Information Act and provided to The New York Times, show that the F.D.A. had data showing that so-called off-label prescribing was widespread. But officials did little to intervene. “If any opioids were going to be tightly regulated, it would be these,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, an opioid policy researcher at Brandeis University, who was not involved in the investigation. “They had the fox guarding the henhouse, people were getting hurt — and the F.D.A. sat by and watched this happen.” Officials at the F.D.A. said they had reviewed evidence indicating that many patients without cancer were given the drugs. But they said that piecemeal data from various stakeholders — prescriber surveys, insurance claims and industry reports — made it difficult for the agency to measure potential harm to patients. “The information we have isn’t very good, but it seems to indicate people who aren’t cancer patients are getting this and people who aren’t opioid tolerant are getting this,” Dr. Janet Woodcock, the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the F.D.A., said in an interview. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 25291 - Posted: 08.04.2018

Illegal, underground and said to be brimming with health benefits — the practice of microdosing psychedelic drugs is growing increasingly popular, yet it remains relatively unstudied and its reported benefits unproven. A group of Canadian researchers is hoping to change that with new data that begins to shed light on how and why people microdose, and what they say are its effects and drawbacks. Microdosing is the practice of taking minute doses of hallucinogens like LSD or psilocybin (the active compound in so-called magic mushrooms) for therapeutic purposes. The amounts are too small to produce a high but large enough to quell anxiety or improve mood, according to users. Researchers at the University of Toronto, York University and Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health collaborated on the study, which they say is the first of its kind. The team targeted microdosing communities on Reddit and other social media channels with an anonymous online survey last year. They received 909 completed responses from current and former microdosers as well as others who had no experience with the practice. The survey yielded information about how much and how often people microdosed: typically 10 to 20 micrograms of LSD (about one- or two-tenths of a tab) or 0.2 to 0.5 grams of dried magic mushrooms, about once every three days or once per week. Thomas Anderson presented the findings at the Beyond Psychedelics conference in Prague in June. Those who microdosed reported a number of benefits, including improved mood, increased focus and productivity, and better connection with others. ©2018 CBC/Radio-Canada.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 25290 - Posted: 08.04.2018