Rats experience mental health issues too: stress, anxiety, and fear.
🐭 By studying the rat brain, we can learn more about the human brain. By understanding the brain better, we may eventually develop new treatments for people who suffer from mental disorders.
Psychedelics are among the newest things in mental health treatment. However, the drugs we classify as psychedelics are, despite their shared psychedelic properties, actually very different.
🧠 They target different receptors, remain active for different lengths of time, are metabolized differently, and have distinct chemical structures (see the figure).
We asked whether these differences also lead to distinct long-term effects on brain circuits known to be involved in stress, anxiety, and fear.
Our study has just been published in Nature Communications: https://lnkd.in/eg3F5–E
💫 While scanning the brains of rats before, during, and after administering a psychedelic drug, we found that these compounds induced both shared and distinct effects in the brain. The image below shows the long term effects of diffect psychedelics on brain energy consumption.
This information may help guide future treatments, where the choice of psychedelic could be important for targeting specific disorders.
However, it is important to remember that these findings are from rats. We still need to replicate them in humans and test their relevance in clinical disorders. Therefore, there is still a long way to go.
