Explained: How Can Rats On ¡®Magic Mushrooms¡¯ Could Help People With Anorexia

Researchers may be able to learn more about how psychedelic medications can be used to treat anorexia in humans by administering them to lab rats.

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Psilocybin, a psychoactive substance found in "magic mushrooms," has shown promise in the treatment of the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. But not everyone can use them.

What is anorexia nervosa?

Anorexia nervosa, also known as just "anorexia," is an eating disorder characterised by an abnormally low body weight, a strong fear of gaining weight, and a skewed sense of weight. Anorexics put great emphasis on maintaining their weight and physical appearance, often by making excessive attempts that seriously disrupt their lives.

People with anorexia typically severely restrict their food intake in order to avoid gaining weight or to keep losing weight. By making themselves throw up after eating, or by abusing laxatives, diet supplements, diuretics, or enemas, they can reduce their calorie intake. They might also make an effort to lose weight by overexerting themselves. No matter how much weight is removed, the person's anxiety of weight gain never goes away.

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Starvation is a component in the anorexia nervosa physical signs and symptoms. Along with mental and behavioural problems, anorexia also involves an erroneous assessment of body weight and a crippling dread of putting on weight or getting obese.

What is considered a low body weight varies from person to person and some people may not appear exceedingly thin, it may be challenging to identify the signs and symptoms. Additionally, anorexics frequently conceal their health issues, eating patterns, and thinness.

How can psilocybin prove useful for it?

It is intended that psilocybin would assist in "breaking down" these deeply ingrained thought and behaviour patterns. Curiously, though, not everyone who receives psilocybin treatments experiences clinically substantial gains, particularly those who have anorexia nervosa. Scientists are working to uncover the molecular factors that may explain why some people may benefit from psychedelics while others do not.

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Studies on laboratory animals can aid researchers in understanding how drugs affect our bodies and how they can alter behaviour. Scientists can study the functioning of the brain at a level of depth not feasible in human research by using animals that serve as models for people. For instance, they are able to precisely correlate particular elements of learning behaviour with variations in the release of brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters.

Use of rats as guinea pigs

Drug trial participants are frequently "blinded," or kept in the dark about whether they are receiving the real medication or a false placebo dose. But they might assert a positive experience because of preconceived notions. These problems can be avoided in animal experiments, which is crucial for psychedelic research because it is impossible to "blind" animals to the potent subjective effects of psychedelic substances. Using the most well-known animal model of the disorder, known as activity-based anorexia, researchers at Monash University are attempting to understand the unique biology and chemistry of psilocybin relevant to anorexia nervosa.

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The experimental setup, which dates back to the 1960s, involves giving animals unrestricted access to a running wheel but restricting their access to food to a time-only (but not quantity-limited) window of time. Bizarrely, even when their body weights are extremely low, rats or mice will choose to exercise over eating. Animals without access to a running wheel quickly develop a tolerance for the timed food availability and consume enough food during that time to maintain body weight.

However, it appears that the animals with a running wheel who constantly exercise have some sort of learning process failure since they never learn to adjust to the feeding schedule. Researchers from Monash University have also demonstrated a particular brain circuit connecting weight loss with rigid learning in rats.

What do the tests hope to achieve?

Researchers from Monash University are examining how psilocybin affects adaptive learning in rats and mice since anorexia in humans and the anorexia rat model are both based on rigid thinking. The research seeks to understand how alterations in brain function influence changes in learning. The actions of the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin are of special interest to the researchers. Psilocybin appears to have some intriguing effects on reward learning in animal models, which may help to explain why it is effective in treating anorexia nervosa.

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It gives hope for a variety of psychiatric illnesses like depression, anxiety, and PTSD that are similarly characterised by reduced flexibility of behaviour. Before psychedelics are included in mental health treatments, it is important to understand how psilocybin alters dopamine and serotonin signalling in the brain. However, a drugged rat on a wheel might reveal more about the human brain than such a bizarre experiment might imply.

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