Science1 publisher3 min readPublished
Psilocybin may protect rat brains from repeated mild head impacts, a new study suggests
Researchers at Northeastern and Carleton universities report in Communications Biology that psilocybin may protect rat brains from three mild head impacts. Hits like these can raise CTE risk and have no established treatment, though the evidence so far is brain imaging in rats.
The Scientist · Science desk
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What happened
- The three hits caused no loss of consciousness in the rats but still left changes in brain networks that showed up on MRI and functional MRI.
- Craig Ferris at Northeastern University led the work, and co-author Argel Aguilar-Valles of Carleton University described it to Live Science.
- Aguilar-Valles said he knows of no intervention for such hits, and doctors usually advise observation, ice and a few quiet days.
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Why it matters
- constraint Every outcome described is a rat brain scan, so dementia and CTE, the conditions a treatment would have to prevent, fall outside what this study measured.
- decision A human trial would have to work out whom to dose, because the target injury causes no blackout and usually never reaches a clinic.
- capability If the effect holds in people, doctors would have a drug to offer after a hit that currently gets ice and watchful waiting.
The experiment is designed around the kind of hit that rarely reaches a clinic. Aguilar-Valles said the aim was to model the cumulative effect of mild blows. Those are common in children and older adults, and he said they usually lead to no treatment or hospital stay [14]. "It's a risk factor for several forms of dementia," he said [15].
In the rats, three controlled, fairly mild hits were enough to leave a trace [6]. He said the hits produce alterations in brain networks that show up on MRI, which looks at the brain's structure, or on functional MRI, which analyzes brain activity [7]. According to Live Science, the study suggests psilocybin might protect the brain from that damage [1].
The thing this doesn't tell you is whether a rat brain that looks less disturbed on a scan belongs to an animal that would have gone on to neurodegeneration. Imaging changes are an early, measurable stand-in. CTE and dementia take decades to appear in people, and this study used only lab rats [c2, c3]. The interview excerpt does not report the dose, the number of animals, when the drug was given relative to the hits, or how large the protective effect was.
Defining "mild" across species is its own problem. Aguilar-Valles said it is always difficult to compare what a rat is experiencing with what a human might experience, especially in this case [9]. His working line is consciousness. "One good way to put it is that there's no loss of consciousness," he said [8].
The choice of drug comes from his lab's wider programme. The group tests psychoplastogens, a class that covers serotonergic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD, plus ketamine and MDMA [13]. "We didn't coin the term, but it basically refers to all of these drugs that produce these brain-plasticity effects," he said [16]. His lab already studies how ketamine and serotonergic psychedelics act as novel antidepressants [4]. Psilocybin itself has been explored for depression, PTSD and anorexia [12].
The clinical gap is real. "Well, as far as I'm aware, there's not really an intervention," he said [10]. For a child who comes home from school with a bump and no blackout, he said, the usual advice is observation, ice and a few days of not overdoing it [11].
In my view the design is a sensible first test. It picks an injury that has no treatment and does have a signature you can measure in the brain [c10, c7]. Getting from there to a therapy means showing a clinical benefit in people. It also means reaching patients whose injuries, by Aguilar-Valles's own account, usually never get a medical visit at all [14].
What to watch
- The full Communications Biology paper's dose, timing, animal numbers and control groups, which would show how large the protective effect on the MRI measures was.
- Any behavioural or long-term follow-up in the three-hit rats that links the imaging changes, and their reversal, to later neurodegeneration.
- Whether the group tests other psychoplastogens such as ketamine or MDMA in the same mild-impact model.