(This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays.)
By Nancy Lapid
May 6 (Reuters) – We also report on two more studies involving wildly popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, including one that shows promise in treating alcohol abuse.
PSYCHEDELIC DRUG BRINGS LASTING BRAIN CHANGES, SENSE OF WELL-BEING
A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic drug that’s being fast-tracked for U.S. approval, causes anatomical brain changes that last for up to a month, according to a study that provides never-before-seen insight into how such drugs affect the mind.
Twenty-eight healthy volunteers who had never taken a psychedelic drug were given either a single 25-milligram dose of a psilocybin pill developed by Compass Pathways or a placebo and monitored with brain imaging and measurement techniques before, during and one month after the treatment, researchers reported in Nature Communications.
Psilocybin led to increased entropy – the diversity of neural activity in the brain – in the minutes and hours after taking the drug, suggesting the psychedelic led the brain to process a richer body of information, the researchers said.
The degree of entropy predicted how much insight, or emotional self-awareness, participants felt the next day. This in turn predicted improvements in their sense of well-being a month later.
“Psilocybin seems to loosen up stereotyped patterns of brain activity and give people the ability to revise entrenched patterns of thought,” study leader Taylor Lyons of Imperial College London said in a statement.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently gave a “priority voucher” to Compass, which is testing its drug in patients with treatment-resistant depression, significantly cutting the agency’s review time for potential approval.
In previous late-stage trials, single doses of psilocybin have reduced symptoms within days in patients whose depression had not responded to traditional therapies.
In the new study, one month after the psilocybin dose, an MRI test that measures diffusion of water along neural tracts in the brain found less diffusion than before the treatment – the opposite of what happens in aging, when white matter loses integrity and diffusion increases, according to the report.
Volunteers who experienced the largest increases in brain entropy in the hours after taking psilocybin were the most likely to have increased insight the next day and increased well-being a month later, leading the researchers to conclude that improved well-being was driven by the experience of insight.
The findings could improve treatment for people with mental illness, the researchers said.
“We already knew psilocybin could be helpful for treating mental illness,” senior researcher Robin Carhart-Harris of UCSF said in a statement. “But now we have a much better understanding of how.”
SEMAGLUTIDE CURBS DRINKING IN ALCOHOL USE DISORDER
Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 drug semaglutide significantly reduced alcohol consumption and heavy drinking days in patients with alcohol use disorder and obesity in a Danish trial.
Among 108 patients treated with Novo’s Wegovy for 26 weeks, the number of heavy drinking days was reduced by 41 percentage points in the semaglutide group compared with 26 percentage points in the placebo group, researchers said.
Everyone in the trial had sought treatment for their alcohol use disorder, and everyone also received psychological counseling during the course of the study.
Participants were averaging roughly 17 heavy drinking days per month, and that dropped to about five with semaglutide versus nine with placebo, according to a report in The Lancet.
Semaglutide was also linked with improvements in secondary outcomes, including total alcohol consumption, number of drinks per drinking day, alcohol craving, and psychological health.
Patients also saw metabolic benefits including substantial weight loss, according to study leader Anders Fink-Jensen of Copenhagen University Hospital.
The effects of semaglutide on control of alcohol use disorder, due to the drug’s interaction with the brain’s reward pathways, would probably disappear if patients stop taking the drug, Fink-Jensen said.
It is unclear whether the effects would also be apparent in non-obese patients, he added.
However, the researchers said, “these data, when added to the growing evidence, demonstrate the potential of GLP-1s as a novel treatment for alcohol use disorder.”
SURGERY BOOSTS WEIGHT LOSS AFTER GLP-1 TREATMENTS
People who begin obesity treatment with GLP-1 drugs and then undergo bariatric surgery achieve substantially greater weight loss than with the medications alone, researchers reported in San Antonio at the annual meeting of the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery.
Researchers reviewed data on 9,174 users of Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide, sold as Wegovy and Ozempic, or Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide (Zepbound and Mounjaro) who later underwent either gastric bypass or sleeve gastrectomy operations.
While taking the drugs in the months before surgery, patients lost an average of about 8% of their total body weight, according to a brief summary of the study published in Surgery for Obesity and Related Diseases.
Three years post-surgery, mean total weight loss averaged roughly 26% after bypass and 20% after sleeve gastrectomy.
Weight loss at three years was similar in a comparison group of more than 100,000 patients who had the operations without prior GLP-1 treatment.
“Patients are increasingly having surgery after GLP-1 therapy, making it important to understand how prior medical treatment may influence outcomes,” study leader Dr. Karan R. Chhabra of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine said in a statement.
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(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; additional reporting by Shawana Alleyne-Morris; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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