Chemistry A new lsd type drug?

[Bare_head]

A team at UC Davis led by David Olson rearranged just two atoms in the LSD molecule to create JRT, a compound that keeps the psychedelics brain-repairing power while stripping away its hallucinations. In animal studies, JRT drove a surge in neuroplasticity, raising dendritic spine density by 46 percent, and delivered antidepressant effects roughly 100 times stronger than ketamine, without triggering the gene activity tied to psychosis. Published in PNAS, the work opens possible doors for treating depression, schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disease by physically rebuilding damaged neural connections. The crucial caveat is that everything so far is preclinical, limited to lab and animal models, so human trials are still needed before any of it reaches patients.

What are your thoughts on this approach to treating mental health conditions? Where do you see neuroscience heading in the next decade?

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Now I seen this on facebook on site called fact central. I am ver skeptical of this and even if they did i doubt it ever hits humans on any type of level other than maybe a trial?!?!

Someone with some chemistry background tell me this is bullshit so I can be at peace

 

[red22]

Someone with some chemistry background tell me this is bullshit so I can be at peace

One of my first thoughts is how could JRT add to an LSD experience, i.e., like a terpene for the lysergamides.

 

[Vastness]

Interesting, it seems to be true, from my cursory googling, but the studies have all been done in mice as far as I can tell. I wouldn't say it's "bullshit", it's just very early days and doesn't sound like anything particularly groundbreaking, someone else (maybe with some biochemical higher educational background, lol) please correct me if I'm wrong but research into LSD analogues for treatment of mental health conditions isn't a new area, and reported effects like this that look promising in animals isn't some uniquely new and amazing thing either, this kind of stuff has been observed before, and it's nice in an abstract sense to hear about research like this still going on, just until it gets to human trials I don't think there's much reason to get excited about it, call me a cynical old party pooper...

Just as a personal kinda irk I always find these kinda claims - "100 times stronger than ketamine" in "antidepressant effects" - so frustrating, I mean, wtf does that even mean? Obviously it does actually mean something quite literal here since these are mice studies, it'll mean that in some fairly horrific stuff like forced swim or learned helplessness tests that when you traumatized a mouse (or rather, thousands of mice) in some horrible way, if you then gave it a big dose of ketamine and (presumably after the ketamine had worn off) chucked them in an inescapable tank of water until they drowned, if the effect of ketamine was that on average the mice kept swimming for 3 seconds longer than the control un-ketamined, but still traumatized and depressed mice before giving up and drowning, mice given a dose of this new drug kept swimming for 300 seconds longer before they still eventually drowned... ergo, it's "100 times stronger than ketamine as an antidepressant", lol... but what does that actually mean in humans? Who knows... it's always pop-science clickbaity bullshit that uses these stupid quantified phrases to refer to fairly unquantified, vague, broad psychological phenomena that aren't measured on a linear sliding scale that means making these claims makes any sense...

What are your thoughts on this approach to treating mental health conditions? Where do you see neuroscience heading in the next decade?

I mean yeah it's cool in one sense because more scientific research is nice to see and study into drugs is nice to see, but on the other hand it's kinda sad and stupid because we actually don't really need to be investing all this time and effort looking into quirky analogues, and slaughtering millions of mice and other lab animals to do so, not to mention condemning probably millions of humans to more years of unrelieved psychological suffering while this research plods along, because we already know, and have done for some time, that we have a selection of very promising chemicals with clear but completely under-researched, psychological utility in the form of the classical hallucinogens... ie, LSD and psilocybin, plus whatever others have existed for years which you'd like to add to that list... The only reason researchers are forced into these interesting but ultimately frustratingly unnecessary detours is because of prohibition, ie, the War on Drugs, the continued illegality of LSD and psilocybin and consequently massive barriers to researching those ones before coming up with fancy new analogues.