More history on the sacred substance known as ayahuasca.
Via Discovery Magazine:
A lot is going on in ayahuasca, which has two main ingredients. The first, Psychotria viridis, is a perennial shrub called chacruna that contains N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, the so-called “Spirit Molecule.” An incredibly powerful psychedelic, DMT binds to the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A, as well as the sigma-1 receptor, both of which have been shown to impact depression regulation.
But DMT is not active orally, so that’s where the second ingredient comes in. Banisteriopsis caapi is a vine that contains tetrahydroharmine, harmine, and harmaline, β-carbolinic alkaloids which are monoamine oxidase inhibitors. MAOIs not only work as antidepressants, they prevent DMT from breaking down in the digestive tract, making it psychoactive for ten hours or more. Tetrahydroharmine is also a weak selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, another class of antidepressant drug.
In other words, ayahuasca is a soup of different chemicals uniquely acting on multiple depression pathways. Neuroscience researcher Amanda Feilding says these results are expected and consistent with her research. In 1998, she founded the Beckley Foundation, a United Kingdom-based think tank dedicated to investigating psychedelics as medicine, including ayahuasca.
“It definitely has been shown to help lift depression and leave a long afterglow, which can go on for weeks or months. People score higher on tests of mindfulness, optimism, openness, after ayahuasca,” Feilding says. “I think the slight un-recreationalness [sic] of it suits the puritanical mode of the times, because no one can accuse it of being a party drug. I think it has great healing potential, as indeed, to a certain degree, is shown by this research.”
A 2017 study funded by Beckley showed that ayahuasca compounds can promote the birth of new brain cells, or neurogenesis, in petri dishes. We’ll know if the same effect happens in vivo soon. That’s because it wasn’t a happy ending for all the ayahuasca marmosets. Galvão-Coelho says some were returned to their family groups, but others were “sacrificed,” as she put it, to study changes in the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus after consuming ayahuasca.
Whatever further research on ayahuasca brings, it will almost certainly be interesting.It may sound cruel, but this kind of research could help develop therapies for Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and, of course, depression.
Trippy: Scientists Gave Depressed Monkeys Ayahuasca And It Helped was originally published on globalgrind.com
