A Psychedelic Drug Passes a Big Test for PTSD Treatment

upstart writes in with an IRC submission for AzumaHazuki:

A Psychedelic Drug Passes a Big Test for PTSD Treatment:

Scott Ostrom, a participant in the trial, has suffered from P.T.S.D. since returning from Iraq in 2007. Now, he no longer has nightmares. "Literally, I'm a different person," he said.Credit...Elliot Ross for The New York Times

[...] In an important step toward medical approval, MDMA, the illegal drug popularly known as Ecstasy or Molly, was shown to bring relief to those suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder when paired with talk therapy.

Of the 90 people who took part in the new study, which is expected to be published later this month in Nature Medicine, those who received MDMA during therapy experienced a significantly greater reduction in the severity of their symptoms compared with those who received therapy and an inactive placebo. Two months after treatment, 67 percent of participants in the MDMA group no longer qualified for a diagnosis of PTSD, compared with 32 percent in the placebo group.

MDMA produced no serious adverse side effects. Some participants temporarily experienced mild symptoms like nausea and loss of appetite.

"This is about as excited as I can get about a clinical trial," said Gul Dolen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research. "There is nothing like this in clinical trial results for a neuropsychiatric disease."

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