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When all else fails, some patients trying to overcome alcoholism, severe depression or anxiety, and even cluster headaches, turn to psychedelic drugs, which clinical research has shown can help treat individuals with these conditions, sometimes with dramatically positive results. But sometimes, as with any therapy, the psychedelic treatment does not work. It just takes a patient on a long strange trip.
Now, UNC School of Medicine researchers led by Bryan Roth, MD, PhD, the Michael Hooker Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, report that one reason for treatment disparity could be common genetic variations in one serotonin receptor.
Published in the journal ACS Chemical Neuroscience, the lab research in cells shows that seven variants uniquely and differentially impact the receptor’s response to four psychedelic drugs — psilocin, LSD, 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT) and mescaline.
“Based on our study, we expect that patients with different genetic variations will react differently to psychedelic-assisted treatments,” said Roth, who leads the NIH Psychotropic Drug Screening Program. “We think physicians should consider the genetics of a patient’s serotonin receptors to identify which psychedelic compound is likely to be the most effective treatment in future clinical trials.”
After decades of taboo regarding potential therapeutic benefit of psychotropic drugs, there has been renewed interest and research in using such compounds to treat neuropsychiatric disorders, such as major depression disorder, because the drugs stimulate serotonin receptors in the brain. These receptors bind the neurotransmitter serotonin and other similar amine-containing molecules, helping regulate people’s mood and emotions, as well as their appetite. In particular, the 5-hydroxytryptamine receptor known as 5-HT2A is responsible for mediating how a person reacts to psychedelic drugs. However, there are several naturally occurring, random genetic variations, known as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, that can affect the function and structure of the 5-HT2A receptor.
Roth and colleagues wanted to explore how variations in this one serotonin receptor changes the activity of four psychedelic therapies.
UNC Graduate student Gavin Schmitz and postdoctoral researchers Manish Jain, PhD, and Samuel Slocum, PhD, used a series of experimental assays to measure the effect that seven different SNPs had on in vitro binding and signaling of the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor when in the presence of one of the four drugs. Their results indicated that some gene variations — even ones far from the exact location where the drug binds to the receptor — alter the way that the receptor interacts with the psychedelic drugs.
For example, the SNP Ala230Th had decreased response to one of the four drugs (psilocin the active metabolite of psilocybin) while the Ala447Val mutation showed only reduced effects to two of the drugs.
“This is another piece of the puzzle we must know when deciding to prescribe any therapeutic with such dramatic effect aside from the therapeutic effect,” Roth said. “Further research will help us continue to find the best ways to help individual patients.”
The National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded this research.
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In the first year of the pandemic, San Francisco and other communities in California offered private hotel rooms, three meals a day and on-site medical services to homeless people who were at risk of getting severe COVID-19.
The aim was to stop the spread of the virus among a highly vulnerable group, but the policy had another important effect, according to new research by UC San Francisco, UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Department of Public Health. It dramatically lowered the use of acute medical care by the hotel occupants who had used this type of care the most in the past.
The hotels provided different levels of medical care, anywhere from half a day of on-site nursing to full-time medical staff who went on daily rounds. Researchers said this solved two of the problems that unsheltered people often face when they are seriously ill: trouble accessing regular medical care and not having a place to go once they are ready to leave the hospital.
“Our research highlights how a program for people experiencing homelessness, which was implemented quickly and out of necessity, had an impact beyond its primary goal of COVID mitigation,” said Maria Raven, MD, MPH, UCSF Chief of Emergency Medicine, Vice Chair in the UCSF Department of Emergency Medicine, and co-lead of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative program on adults with complex needs. “It’s important to study interventions like this that were put in place during a public health emergency, so in a future crisis we can implement programs that are evidenced-based.”
The study was published Wednesday, July 27, 2022, in JAMA Network Open.
The use of medical care fell dramatically across the population in the early days of the pandemic, as people shied away from going to the emergency department, hospitals restricted visitors, and providers shifted care online.
To see how the hotels further reduced acute care use for the people they were sheltering, researchers compared hotel occupants who had used the most acute care services in the nine months before the pandemic to a similar group of unsheltered people who did not get hotel rooms during the pandemic.
Acute care use dropped in both groups, but it fell much more among those in the hotels. Among hotel occupants, emergency visits fell 40 percent, hospitalizations fell 59 percent, and both hospital days and psychiatric emergency visits fell 75 percent, relative to the comparison group.
“We see these reductions in acute care use as evidence of the benefit of these programs beyond just reducing COVID-19,” said Mark Fleming, PhD, an assistant professor at the Berkeley School of Public Health, and the first author of the study. “These are some of the most high-risk, high-need people who are not served well by the current system.”
In addition to Raven and Fleming, other UCSF authors include Jennifer Evans, MS, Dave Graham-Squire, PhD, Caroline Cawley, MPH, Hemal Kanzaria, MD, MSc, and Margot Kushel.
This work was supported by grant K01HS027648 from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at UCSF.
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Materials provided by University of California – San Francisco. Original written by Laura Kurtzman. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Everyday discrimination experienced by people of racial and ethnic minority groups during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with significantly increased odds of moderate to severe depression and thoughts of suicide, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and their colleagues have found.
In a study in JAMA Psychiatry, the team reported that the greater the discrimination, the more pronounced the depressive symptoms.
The associations with depression during the pandemic were highest among Hispanic/Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander participants when the main reason for discrimination was based on race, ancestry, or national origin.
“Previous studies have documented the adverse health effects of discrimination, but we were surprised at the magnitude of the effect on the mental health and quality of life of people who have often had to deal with intolerance in their everyday lives,” says Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD, associate chief for research in the MGH Department of Psychiatry.
“In fact, at high levels of everyday discrimination, the association with moderate to severe depressive symptoms was similar to the effect of having a pre-pandemic mood disorder diagnosis, which is pretty dramatic.”
For communities that routinely face structural racism — including Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Asian/Pacific Islander — the pandemic has been a particularly stressful period, given higher rates of unemployment, food and housing insecurity, limited access to healthcare, and even racially motivated violence.

A new analysis dives into the use of service dogs by U.S. veterans who have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), illuminating factors and mechanisms that may underlie the mental health effects of these relationships. Clare Jensen of Purdue University, Indiana, U.S.A., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on July 27, 2022.
Previous research suggests that pairing a veteran with a service dog is associated with lower severity of PTSD. However, the mechanisms underlying these potential benefits are unclear.
To improve understanding, Jensen and colleagues studied 82 military members or veterans and their service dogs, which had all been trained to alleviate PTSD symptoms. Shortly before the veterans and dogs were paired, and again after a three-month period together, the veterans completed a number of different surveys and allowed the researchers to make additional observations to capture a detailed view of veteran-dog interactions.
The researchers first analyzed results of surveys and records related to personal characteristics of the service dogs and veterans, and the closeness of their bond. They found that most of the dog characteristics evaluated were not associated with better or worse veteran mental health outcomes, except for lower dog excitability, which was linked to lower severity of PTSD symptoms and to a closer veteran-dog relationship.
Next, the researchers probed potential mechanisms underlying alleviation of mental health symptoms by analyzing the results of surveys and observations that captured dog behavior, training methods, and the use of specific trained tasks.
Better mental health was associated with a number of factors, including perception of the dog’s care as being easy and a closer veteran-dog relationship. The analysis also found a link between worse depression and more frequently asking service dogs to initiate the social greeting. Veterans who more frequently asked their dogs to alert them to a human approaching from behind were more likely to have greater anxiety but less severity of PTSD symptoms.
Further research will be needed to expand on these findings, potentially leading to better understanding of how to identify veterans who could benefit from service dogs and how to best select and train dogs.
Clare Jensen adds: “This study provides new information about how and why service dogs may improve mental health for some veterans with PTSD. We are especially grateful to the military veterans who made this possible by sharing their time and experiences with us.”
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Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute have shown that a specific area of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein is a promising target for a pan-coronavirus vaccine that could offer some protection against new virus variants, common colds, and help prepare for future pandemics.
Developing a vaccine that provides protection against a number of different coronaviruses is a challenge because this family of viruses have many key differences, frequently mutate and generally induce incomplete protection against reinfection. This is why people can suffer repeatedly from common colds, and why it is possible to be infected multiple times with different variants of SARS-CoV-2.
A pan-coronavirus vaccine would need to trigger antibodies that recognise and neutralise a range of coronaviruses, stopping the virus from entering hosts cells and replicating.
In their study, published in Science Translational Medicine today (Wednesday 27 July), the researchers investigated whether antibodies that target the S2 subunit of SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein also neutralise other coronaviruses. This specific area of the spike protein tethers it to the virus membrane and allows the virus to fuse with the membrane of a host cell.
The researchers found that after vaccinating mice with SARS-CoV-2 S2, the mice created antibodies that were able to neutralise a number of other animal and human coronaviruses, including the seasonal ‘common cold’ coronavirus HCoV-OC43, the original strain of SARS-CoV-2, the D614G mutant that dominated in the first wave, Alpha, Beta, Delta, the original Omicron and two bat coronaviruses.
Kevin Ng, co-first author and PhD student in the Retrovirus laboratory at the Crick says: “The S2 area of the spike protein is a promising target for a potential pan-coronavirus vaccine because this area is much more similar across different coronaviruses than the S1 area. It is less subject to mutations, and so a vaccine targeted at this area should be more robust.”
George Kassiotis, corresponding author and principal group leader at the Crick, says: “The expectation for a vaccine that targets the S2 area is that it could offer some protection against all current, as well as future, coronaviruses. This differs from vaccines that target the more variable S1 area which, while effective against the matching variant they are designed against, are less able to target other variants or a broad range of coronaviruses.
“There’s a lot of research still to do as we continue to test S2 antibodies against different coronaviruses and look for the most appropriate route to design and test a potential vaccine.”
The S2 area of the spike protein has, until recently, been overlooked as providing a basis for vaccination. This is because certain critical targets in the S2 area are only revealed after the virus has bound to a cell, a process mediated by the S1 area. As a result, there may be a narrower window of opportunity for S2 antibodies to neutralise the virus than for antibodies that target the S1 area.
Nikhil Faulkner, co-first author and PhD student in the Retroviral Immunology Laboratory at the Crick adds: “While a potential S2 vaccine would not stop people being infected, the idea is it would prime their immune system to respond to a future coronavirus infection. This would hopefully provide enough protection to survive an initial infection during which they could develop further immunity specific to that particular virus.”
The researchers will continue this work studying the potential of a pan-coronavirus that targets the S2 area of the spike protein and how it could be integrated with currently licenced vaccines.
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The damaging effects of daily, lifelong exposure to the blue light emanating from phones, computers and household fixtures worsen as a person ages, new research by Oregon State University suggests.
The study, published today in Nature Partner Journals Aging, involved Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, an important model organism because of the cellular and developmental mechanisms it shares with other animals and humans.
Jaga Giebultowicz, a researcher in the OSU College of Science who studies biological clocks, led a collaboration that examined the survival rate of flies kept in darkness and then moved at progressively older ages to an environment of constant blue light from light-emitting diodes, or LEDs.
The darkness-to-light transitions occurred at the ages of two, 20, 40 and 60 days, and the study involved blue light’s effect on the mitochondria of the flies’ cells.
Mitochondria act as a cell’s power plant, generating adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, a source of chemical energy.
In earlier research, Giebultowicz showed that prolonged exposure to blue light affected flies’ longevity, regardless of whether it shined in their eyes.

A diet high in sugar and fat such as burgers, fries and fizzy drinks can negatively affect a new mother’s breast milk and baby’s health even before the child is conceived.
The new study using lab mice has found that even relatively short-term consumption of a fast food diet impacts women’s health, reducing their ability to produce nutritional breast milk after giving birth. This can affect the newborn’s wellbeing, as well as increasing the risk of both mother and child developing potentially fatal conditions such as heart disease, stroke and diabetes in later life.
Even mothers who appear to be a healthy weight can be suffering from hidden issues such as a fatty liver — which may be seen in people who are overweight or obese — from eating a diet heavy in processed foods, which tend to be high in fat and sugar. This can lead to advanced scarring (cirrhosis) and liver failure.
The new findings involved scientists from the Sferruzzi-Perri Lab at the Centre for Trophoblast Research, University of Cambridge, and The Department for the Woman and Newborn Health Promotion at the University of Chile in Santiago, and are published by the journal Acta Physiologica.
Co-lead author Professor Amanda Sferruzzi-Perri, Professor in Fetal and Placental Physiology and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, said: “Women eating diets that tend to have high sugar and high fat content may not realise what impact that might be having on their health, especially if there’s not an obvious change in their body weight.
“They might have greater adiposity — higher levels of fat mass — which we know is a predictor of many health problems. That may not overtly impact on their ability to become pregnant, but could have consequences for the growth of the baby before birth, and the health and wellbeing of the baby after birth.”
It is already recognised that a ‘Western style’ diet high in fat and sugar is contributing to a pandemic of raised body mass index (BMI) and obesity not only in developed countries but also in developing nations undergoing urbanisation, including Chile. As a result, just over half of women (52.7%) in many populations around the world are overweight or obese when they conceive, leading to problems in both achieving and maintaining a healthy pregnancy.

According to ARRS’ American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), for patients with multiple architectural distortion (AD) identified on digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT), biopsy of all areas may be warranted, given the variation of pathologic diagnoses across AD in individual patients.
“Multiple AD, compared with single AD, was significantly more likely to yield high-risk pathology, but there was no significant difference in yield of malignancy,” wrote corresponding author Lilian C. Wang, MD, of Northwestern Medicine. “In patients with multiple AD, multiple ipsilateral or contralateral AD commonly varied in pathologic classification: benign, high risk, or malignant.”
Wang and colleagues’ retrospective study included 402 patients (mean age, 56 years) who underwent image-guided core needle biopsy of AD visualized on DBT between April 7, 2017, and April 16, 2019. Patients were grouped in the single or multiple AD cohort based on the presence of distinct AD areas noted in the clinical report, while the pathologic diagnosis for each AD was based on the most aggressive pathology identified on either biopsy or surgical excision (if performed).
Ultimately, compared with single AD, multiple AD showed a higher frequency of high-risk pathology (53.0% vs. 32.5%, p=.002) but no significantly different frequency of malignancy on a per-lesion or per-patient basis (31.8% vs. 28.2%, p=.56). In 8/24 patients with ?2 ipsilateral biopsied AD, the ipsilateral areas varied in terms of most aggressive pathology; in 5/10 patients with contralateral biopsied AD, the contralateral areas varied in most aggressive pathology.
“To our knowledge,” the authors of this AJR article contended, “this is the first study to compare pathologic outcomes between patients with single and multiple AD visualized by DBT.”
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From immunity to metabolism to mental health, it seems like the gut microbiome has been linked to every aspect of human health and disease.
But with hundreds of bacterial species populating our gastrointestinal tract, it’s a daunting task to pinpoint which molecules made by which bacteria affect which biological processes — and how they do so.
“Microbiome studies need to move from making associations to determining function and causation,” said Ramnik Xavier, the Kurt J. Isselbacher Professor of Medicine in the Field of Gastroenterology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, a core institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and co-director of the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics at MIT.
Such knowledge is essential for learning how to manipulate gut bacteria to treat or prevent illness.
A team led by researchers at HMS and the Broad has just accomplished the rare feat of connecting those dots for one important gut bacterium.
“The real significance of this work was connecting a bacterium, the molecule it makes, the pathway it operates through, and the biological outcome,” said Jon Clardy, the Hsien Wu and Daisy Yen Wu Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and co-senior author of the study with Xavier. “That’s very rare.”
Clardy, Xavier, and colleagues focused on Akkermansia muciniphila, a species that accounts for an impressive 3 percent of the gut microbiome. It gets its name from the intestinal mucus it breaks down.

New Leicester research has found that people who commute by car can be subject to higher levels of harmful gases than those who walk or cycle to work.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Leicester in partnership with Leicester City Council, is published in the Journal of Transport & Health.
Experts found that in-cabin levels of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) — a key indicator of air quality and harmful when breathed in by humans — were higher for weekday morning commuters travelling by car, compared to their counterparts travelling by bike or on foot. However, the concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) was shown to be slightly lower for drivers.
Researchers studied four typical routes used by Leicester commuters between city suburbs and the city centre, and used air quality sensors in volunteer walkers’ and cyclists’ backpacks to measure the concentrations of NO2 and PM2.5. The same devices were also fitted in the cabin of a Nissan Leaf electric vehicle. An electric car was used in order to determine driver exposure to pollutants without interference from the car’s own exhaust.
Their findings show that NO2 concentrations can be higher in car cabins (even electric car cabins) than alongside the road where people are walking and cycling. Some PM2.5 can be removed, for example by pollen filters, meaning PM2.5 might be slightly lower in car cabins than alongside the road, but NO2 can be drawn directly into the cabin from the exhaust of traffic in front. This will change as more electric cars come into use, but provides evidence to support the benefits of getting out of a car and walking or cycling instead.
Dr Rikesh Panchal is a Research Associate within the University of Leicester’s Centre for Environmental Health and Sustainability, and lead author for the study. He said:
“Anecdotal evidence on public perceptions of air quality during commuting collected by Leicester City Council suggested that people believed that exposure to harmful pollutants was higher for active commuters than for car occupants.