Recreational MDMA doses do not elicit hepatotoxicity in HepG2 spheroids under normo- and hyperthermia - PubMed
MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), an entactogen with empathogenic and prosocial effects, is widely used in music festivals and other festive settings. High MDMA doses have been associated with drug-induced liver injury and cases of hyperthermia. Although the latter condition is thought to in …
The entactogen 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA; ecstasy) as a treatment aid in psychotherapy and its safety concerns - PubMed
The phenylethylamine, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, 'ecstasy'), is the prototypical example of an entactogen. Its original placement in highly restrictive drug usage categories in the US and UK, led to an inevitable restriction on MDMA neuroscience research and treatment. The dominant pha …
Entactogen Effects of Ketamine: A Reverse-Translational Study - PubMed
In patients with treatment-resistant depression, ketamine treatment was associated with increased pleasure from social situations, such as feeling pleasure from helping others. Ketamine-treated rats were more likely to protect their cage mate from harm, at the cost of obtaining sucrose. These findin …
Therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics and entactogens - Neuropsychopharmacology
Recent clinical and preclinical evidence suggests that psychedelics and entactogens may produce both rapid and sustained therapeutic effects across several indications. Currently, there is a disconnect between how these compounds are used in the clinic and how they are studied in preclinical species, which has led to a gap in our mechanistic understanding of how these compounds might positively impact mental health. Human studies have emphasized extra-pharmacological factors that could modulate psychedelic-induced therapeutic responses including set, setting, and integration—factors that are poorly modelled in current animal experiments. In contrast, animal studies have focused on changes in neuronal activation and structural plasticity—outcomes that are challenging to measure in humans. Here, we describe several hypotheses that might explain how psychedelics rescue neuropsychiatric disease symptoms, and we propose ways to bridge the gap between human and rodent studies. Given the diverse pharmacological profiles of psychedelics and entactogens, we suggest that their rapid and sustained therapeutic mechanisms of action might best be described by the collection of circuits that they modulate rather than their actions at any single molecular target. Thus, approaches focusing on selective circuit modulation of behavioral phenotypes might prove more fruitful than target-based methods for identifying novel compounds with rapid and sustained therapeutic effects similar to psychedelics and entactogens.
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