Advances in Psychedelic Medicine: State-Of-the-Art Therapeutic Applications by Winkelman Michael J.; Sessa Ben;

Author:Winkelman, Michael J.; Sessa, Ben;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 5717934
Publisher: ABC-CLIO, LLC

* This article was originally published in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies.

PART 3

Medical Hypotheses

CHAPTER TEN

Effects of Psychedelics on

Inflammation and Immunity

Attila Szabo

The first landmark studies of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) involving human subjects were done by Stephen Szára (1956) and Rick Strassman (Strassman, Qualls, & Berg, 1996), who started to map its psychological effects in healthy volunteers during the mid-fifties and early nineties, respectively. However, the great majority of the initial investigations into psychedelics sought to understand their role in the etiology of mental disorders and evaluate their feasible therapeutic applications in clinical psychiatry. To date, the emphasis of these investigations has mostly focused on the understanding and realization of their psychedelic properties, that is, their mind-altering and neurobehavioral effects, and has almost entirely neglected their involvement in physiological processes at both systemic and cellular levels. Biomedical research specifically probing psychedelics’ physiological effects has only begun recently.

These novel research endeavors have unveiled several pathways and mechanisms through which the neurotransmitter receptors involved in psychedelic effects can also modulate a multitude of immune processes, suggesting novel therapeutic possibilities (Nichols, 2016; Nichols, Johnson, & Nichols, 2017; Szabo, 2015). This promising new field may offer us innovative and unique forms of treatment in various pathologies from chronic inflammation and autoimmunity to infectious diseases and cancer. An important foundation for this emerging field was established about three decades ago when scientists with different academic backgrounds created a novel conception by linking theoretical frameworks of neuroscience, psychology, immunology, and related fields. This multidisciplinary conceptual platform gave rise to such fields as neuroimmunology and psychoneuroimmunology, a novel framework that emerged from a scientific revolution, a true paradigm shift in the Kuhnian sense.

The observation that behavior influences the ability of vertebrates to resist disease, and vice versa, that infections or physical ailments cause predictable alterations in behavior led to the establishment of psychoneuroimmunology, a new field merging neuroscience, endocrinology, immunology, and behavioral sciences (Ader, 2000). This bidirectional interaction between the brain and immunity is possible because the elements of both systems express receptors for each others’ signals. For example, neurons and glial cells have receptors for immune mediators, and immune cells express receptors for neuromodulators, such as dopamine and serotonin. Another layer of this interaction has been revealed by recent studies showing that, in fact, immune cells are also capable of producing small amounts of neuromodulators, which are essential in peripheral immune regulation, and that the brain uses immune modulators for neuro- and gliotransmission (Miller, Haroon, & Felger, 2017; Miller, Maletic, & Raison, et al., 2009). Yet another level of interaction exists that allows peripheral immune signals to cross the blood-brain barrier and also to recruit certain types of immune cells to the brain parenchyma under pathological conditions. This intricate brain-immune bidirectional communication must provide the organism with adaptive value, otherwise it would be hard to imagine how this sophisticated biobehavioral dynamics evolved. Furthermore, the connections of brain, behavior, and immunity exist across phyla, suggesting that these interactions have been highly conserved during hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

The

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