Psilocybin cut two specific brain chemicals in depressed patients — here's what that means

Key Findings

Psilocybin Tested in Anorexia — A Condition With Almost No Good Treatments 🍄

• A pilot study in adult females with anorexia nervosa tested psilocybin therapy and found it was both tolerable and showed early signs of therapeutic benefit.
• Anorexia has among the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric disorder and very few effective pharmacological options, which makes even a small pilot signal worth watching.

DMT Did More Than Lift Mood — It Improved Quality of Life Too

• Inhaled DMT was associated with reductions in anxiety and improvements in life satisfaction and quality of life in both healthy volunteers and patients with depression — not just symptom scores.
• The study explored longer-term effects, an area that has been sparse in DMT research, suggesting the drug's impact may extend beyond the acute experience.

Ketamine and ECT Both Boost the Same Serotonin Receptor — Despite Very Different Mechanisms

• A re-analysis of PET brain imaging data from 222 scans across three centers found that both ketamine and electroconvulsive therapy increased serotonin 1B receptor binding — ketamine by about 6%, ECT by about 9%.
• The two treatments work through completely different primary targets, so finding the same downstream serotonin change suggests a shared pathway that neither treatment was designed to hit.

Repeat Ketamine Injections Hold Up Over Time — With a Catch

• An open-label extension of the KADS trial found that repeated subcutaneous ketamine remained effective and safe for treatment-resistant depression over a longer follow-up period.
• Patients who had received prior ketamine treatment showed different response patterns, raising questions about whether the drug's effectiveness changes with repeated exposure.

First-Time Psychedelic Use Linked to Small Personality Shifts in College Students

• A year-long study of 102 first-time psychedelic users and over 1,000 non-users at a Berlin university found small increases in openness and small decreases in conscientiousness among new users.
• The effect sizes were modest, the changes weren't clearly different from first-time users of other illicit substances, and causal interpretation is limited — but the longitudinal design is stronger than most naturalistic psychedelic research.

Australian Cancer Clinicians Want Psilocybin as a Tool — But Have Questions About Delivery

• A qualitative study found that Australian healthcare professionals working with cancer patients viewed psilocybin-assisted therapy as a potentially valuable option for existential distress, a symptom with very limited current treatments.
• Clinicians expressed support in principle but raised practical concerns about how sessions should be structured, who should deliver them, and what training would be required.