Many people with tough-to-treat depression may be trying psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, as an alternative to antidepressants. Thinking that it’s a “natural” drug, folks might assume it comes without side effects. That assumption would be wrong. People in a new study who took psilocybin often experienced headache, nausea, anxiety, dizziness and elevated blood pressure — side effects similar to those seen with regular antidepressants, according to a team from the University of Georgia in Athens (UGA). The good news: Such side effects were only temporary. It’s less clear if longer-term side effects might emerge with time, the researchers noted. The short-term side effects “are what we may expect from your traditional antidepressants because those medications work in a similar fashion to psilocybin. They both target serotonin receptors,” explained senior study author Dr. Joshua Caballero, an associate professor in UGA’s College of Pharmacy. “It’s very encouraging,” he added in a university news release, “because the studies we examined consist of just one or two doses per patient, and we’re finding that the beneficial effects of psilocybin may stay for months when treating depression.” Psilocybin was shunned by the medical community for decades because, at higher doses, it can have hallucinatory properties. But used under the guidance and supervision of a therapist, the drug is having a comeback as a new form of antidepressant. But…  read on >  read on >

Many people dogged by depression are turning to the psilocybin found in “magic mushrooms” to ease the condition, and often reporting success. Now, new research suggests much of the credit for that success lies in the relationship between the patient and his or her therapist. It’s the magic of what researchers at Ohio State University (OSU) described as a trust-filled “therapeutic alliance.” In their study of psilocybin for depression, “what persisted the most was the connection between the therapeutic alliance and long-term outcomes, which indicates the importance of a strong relationship,” said lead researcher Adam Levin. He’s a psychiatry and behavioral health resident at OSU’s college of medicine. The findings are based on a re-analysis of data from a 2021 study involving 24 adults with depression. All received two doses of psilocybin plus 11 hours of psychotherapy. The participants also completed a questionnaire that assessed the strength of the therapist-participant relationship. They filled out this therapeutic alliance checklist three times: After eight hours of “preparation therapy” prior to getting the psilocybin, and then one week after each drug treatment. The patient-therapist “alliance score” tended to rise over time, and it correlated with what the researchers called “acute mystical and/or psychologically insightful experiences from the drug treatment.” The stronger these mystical experiences, the better the results when it came to lowered depression — at least over…  read on >  read on >

A British study finds that beyond the physical pain and turmoil of an mpox diagnosis, many of the mostly gay and bisexual men infected during the 2022 outbreak faced stigma, homophobia and shame. Mpox is spread largely through skin-to-skin contact, and the outbreak in Europe and the United States was largely localized to men who have sex with men. Cases were first detected in May of 2022, and the outbreak peaked in August. A vaccine against the disease had already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2019 and was rolled out to at-risk people once the outbreak emerged. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the outbreak of mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) viral illness in the United States sickened more than 32,000 people and killed 58. In the United Kingdom, there were over 3,700 confirmed cases of mpox. The illness is characterized by painful skin lesions that form scabs, and it can be especially harmful in people infected with HIV. In the new study,  a team led by Dr. Charles Witzel, of the University College London (UCL) Institute for Global Health, conducted in-depth interviews with 22 gay and bisexual men who’d been diagnosed with mpox during the outbreak. The interviews focused on their experience with the illness itself, as well as the men’s interactions with health care…  read on >  read on >

Women who smoke and become pregnant may worry that the weight gain that comes with quitting might bring its own harms to themselves or their baby. However, a new study confirms the health benefits of quitting smoking still far exceed any weight-linked concerns. Weight gain can occur once women decide to forgo cigarettes, but even that can be minimized, said a team led by Morgan Dunn. She’s a final year obstetrics and gynecology resident at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey. “We recommend that doctors advise patients to quit while offering nutrition counseling that might minimize the weight gain,” she said in a Rutgers news release. The study was published recently in the journal Hypertension. In the study, Dunn’s group looked at data on health outcomes in over 22 million pregnancies. They found that rates of dangerous hypertension in pregnancy did rise among women who quit smoking. It occurred in 6.8% of pregnancies to nonsmoking women, compared to 8.6% of pregnancies for women who quit smoking when they learned they were pregnant. The percentage rose even higher — to 17% — among women who quit smoking at the outset of a pregnancy and then gained weight that exceeded recommended levels, Dunn’s team found. However, any risk linked to a rise in blood pressure during pregnancy for former smokers were easily eclipsed by…  read on >  read on >

Teenagers are frequently bullied about their weight on social media, and the bullying increases with each hour they spend on these sites, a new study reveals. Nearly one in five teens (17%) said they’d experienced weight-related bullying online, according to results published April 17 in the journal PLOS One. “This experience can have adverse effects, including poor body image, disordered eating behaviors and anxiety and depression symptoms,” said the research team led by David Hammond. He’s a professor with the University of Waterloo School of Public Health Sciences in Ontario, Canada. Further, each additional hour of social media use brought with it a 13% increase in weight-related bullying, researchers calculated. “Notably, greater time spent on screens [was] associated with a greater prevalence of experiencing weight-related bullying,” the researchers reported.  Twitter, now known as X, was the most toxic site, with teens there 69% more likely to be bullied regarding their weight. However, Twitter was also the least-used social media platform among teens, with only 22% saying they used it. But more popular social media sites also had an increased risk of bullying over weight, researchers found: Instagram, used by 55% of teens, had a 35% increased risk of weight bullying Facebook, used by 50% of teens, had a 39% increased risk TikTok, used by 49% of teens, had a 26% increased risk Snapchat, used by…  read on >  read on >

Two-thirds of homeless people are experiencing some form of mental health disorder, a large, new review of data on the subject. The analysis found that men who are homeless are more likely to be battling mental illness than women, although rates were high for both genders compared to the general population. There are signs that rates of mental illness may be on the rise among homeless populations, especially in the United States and Canada, said researchers led by Rebecca Barry, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calgary in Canada. “The most common mental disorders included substance use disorders, antisocial personality disorders, major depression and general mood disorders,” Barry and colleagues reported April 17 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. Her team looked at thousands of published studies worldwide on homelessness and mental illness. They settled on 85 of the most rigorous studies. Overall, more than 48,000 homeless individuals were included in those studies, which were largely based in affluent countries such as the United States, Canada and Germany. The mental health of participants in the studies was assessed using standard psychiatric tests. Barry’s team found that, overall, 67% of homeless people currently have some form of mental illness, while 77% were found to have experienced mental illness at least sometime during their lives. Rates of current mental illness were significantly higher among men (67%) than…  read on >  read on >

There’s no evidence that a COVID infection increases the risk of asthma in children, the first study to date on the subject finds. “We knew from a number of really nice studies over the last decade or more that respiratory viral infections are a risk factor for the development of asthma in children,” said senior study author Dr. David Hill, an attending physician with the division of allergy and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “So there was good rationale to think that potentially SARS-COV-2 infection could also increase the risk of asthma. That’s what we thought we were going to find,” he said. “And what we actually found was that there was no association. It did not increase the risk of children developing asthma, and it did not decrease the risk of children developing asthma.” In the study, the team analyzed data from more than 27,000 children who underwent polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for SARS-COV-2 between March 1, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021. They were followed over an 18-month period. Over 3,100 of the children tested positive, and more than 24,000 tested negative for SARS-COV-2. The researchers found that testing positive for SARS-COV-2 had no significant effect on the likelihood of a new asthma diagnosis. The study did confirm that children with known risk factors for asthma, such as race, food allergies,…  read on >  read on >

In a new study, people living with HIV who got standard meds to keep the virus at bay also had much lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease — suggesting the drugs might also lower risks for the brain illness. It’s early-stage research, but it’s possible that mechanisms used by these HIV drugs work at a genetic level to thwart Alzheimer’s in the brain, concluded a team led by Dr. Jerold Chun. He’s a professor in the degenerative disease program at the nonprofit research group Sanford Burnham Prebys, in La Jolla, Calif. In the study, Chun’s group looked at rates of Alzheimer’s disease among nearly 80,000 HIV-positive individuals over the age of 60. More than 46,000 of them had been prescribed a form of HIV-suppressing medications known as reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors. Among this subgroup, Alzheimer’s diagnoses occurred in about 2.5 people per 1,000 — much less frequently than the 6.15 per 1,000 observed in a control group of older people without HIV, the researchers found. The study wasn’t designed to prove that RT inhibitors directly prevent Alzheimer’s disease. However, the finding was intriguing and there are genetic mechanisms that might explain the link, the scientists said. In findings first published in the journal Nature in 2018, Chun’s lab showed that, in Alzheimer’s patients, a gene found in neurons undergoes mutations that can produce thousands of new…  read on >  read on >