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American researchers studying the effects of psychedelics on eating disorders have found that psilocybin, the main hallucinogenic agent in magic mushrooms, may be able to treat anorexia. U.S. researchers ran the small study, which involved 10 adult women aged 18 to 40 years of age.
Eating disorders such as anorexia, binge eating and bulimia nervosa are some of the most dangerous mental disorders in the United States, taking one life every 52 minutes and costing the country $64.7 billion yearly in medical costs. They are second only to opioids in terms of deadliness and are extremely hard to treat due to the way they warp the minds and mentalities of those they afflict.
Just 46% of people diagnosed with anorexia will make a full recovery, and another 40% will not recover regardless of whether they receive the right medical attention. Conventional treatments for eating disorders such as psychotherapy and cognitive therapy may be effective for some patients, but a large portion of people with eating disorders do not respond to traditional treatments.
The recent surge in psychedelic research has shown that hallucinogenics such as psilocybin may be able to treat severe mental disorders much more effectively than traditional treatments. Major depressive syndrome, treatment-resistant depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and eating disorders are some of the mental conditions that have responded to psychedelic-assisted therapy in research.
The recent study was the first-ever American clinical research trial to report on the use of psilocybin to treat anorexia. The 10 female participants all received a single dose of psilocybin and asked to report their symptoms. Four of the participants said that their symptoms had reduced to such a degree that they qualified to be in remission by the third month of taking psilocybin. Most of the patients who did not see a significant reduction in anorexia symptoms reported that the treatment was still “meaningful and positive.”
The psilocybin dose was safe to consume and did not cause any serious side effects in the study participants.
While the study is small, it shows that psychedelics present an attractive option for the treatment of eating disorders, especially for people who don’t respond to traditional therapies. The research team behind the study acknowledged the small scale of their study but noted that its findings were promising enough to spur further and more extensive research into the potential of treating anorexia with psychedelics.
As many more startups such as atai Life Sciences N.V. (NASDAQ: ATAI) engage in psychedelic research, more reliable information about the medical potential of hallucinogens could yield treatments that are accessible to the public.
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