For stories on the science of healthy living, subscribe to NPR's Health newsletter. Efforts to understand how classic psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD summon powerful changes in consciousness tend to focus on what's happening inside our head. That's because these compounds bind tightly to serotonin receptors that densely populate certain structures of the brain, and a growing number of studies demonstrate they can exert long-lasting changes in mental health and well-being for people with a range of psychiatric conditions.
Increasingly researchers have started to probe how these drugs elicit other physiological changes, given that many cells and tissues beyond the brain possess those same receptors, known as 5-HT2A. Now, new research offers some of the first evidence in humans that psychedelics may also hold potential for combating diseases characterized by inflammation and immune dysregulation throughout the body. The data, published Wednesday in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry, draws from a small pool of patients with Parkinson's disease, but it reflects what's been observed in lab studies with animal and cell models for years.
For certain diseases, psychedelics appear to combat inflammation and even help restore stressed mitochondria, the energy-producing factories of the cells. The team at the University of California, San Francisco, who conducted the study, used blood tests to measure five different signaling molecules involved in inflammation in participants, both before and after two sessions with psilocybin. The participants had significantly lower levels of inflammation following the treatments, compared to baseline, and those changes persisted a month after their final dose of psilocybin.
The researchers also tracked a blood marker of mitochondrial stress. Here, too, there were substantial improvements immediately after participants were given psilocybin, though not during the longer-term follow up. "This gives us an initial biological signal to investigate," says Dr.
Ellen Bradley, an associate professor of psychiatry at UCSF who helped lead the analysis. The findings were based on 12 participants in a pilot study to evaluate the feasibility and safety of giving psilocybin to people with Parkinson's disease. Patients with neurodegenerative disease and inflammatory conditions are typically excluded from trials on psychedelics and mental health for safety concerns.
The findings of the original study, which were published last year, assuaged researchers' concerns about the risks. Bradley says they found a "really promising safety profile" and that "symptoms even seemed to get a bit better." The researchers emphasize that the study has limitations: they did not have a control group, and the participants knew they were receiving the drug. So the data on what was happening in their blood still needs to be confirmed in follow-up studies before making definitive claims, says Aoife O'Donovan, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCSF and co-author of the paper.
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