The psychedelic compound that makes magic mushrooms so trippy shows serious promise for protecting cancer patients from years of chronic pain.
For people undergoing cancer treatment, the nerve pain associated with blasting the body with chemo can be debilitating. Even worse, the pain and discomfort can last for years — well after the body is done fighting cancer — and there’s no effective treatment that relieves it.
Known as peripheral neuropathy, the condition is caused by damage to nerves in the extremities, often the hands, feet, arms, and legs. Now, a research group led by clinicians and researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have found that psilocybin administered to mice prior to dosing them with chemo completely blocks the painful condition from developing.
Mice in the study received two doses of psilocybin, the compound in mushrooms that causes hallucinations. They then underwent six rounds of chemotherapy lasting six months. Animals in a control group not given psilocybin went on to develop hypersensitivity to pain, a dulled sense of touch in their paws, and “withered” sensory nerve fibers in their skin. Miraculously, the animals treated with psilocybin made it through chemo without any of the reduced paw sensation or shriveled nerves. The chemotherapy worked just as well to reduce the tumors for mice in the psilocybin test group.
The results are so compelling that human trials are set to begin this month. Researchers believe that the psilocybin is able to protect nerves from damage by keeping energy-generating mitochondria moving along its normal pathways.
“There is an urgent need for treatments that prevent nerve injury without interfering with lifesaving chemotherapy,” the research group’s co-leader Dr. Moran Amit said. The groundbreaking research was published this week in Nature.
Lingering long-term pain
Because chemo works systemically, affecting parts of the body well beyond the borders of a patient’s cancer cells, nerve damage can be a painful side effect of ridding the body of chemo’s true target. More than a third of chemotherapy patients develop the condition, and that number is expected to increase as evolving treatment continues to improve cancer survival rates in the future. For people treated with platinum-based chemotherapy, common for shrinking tumors in the ovaries and lungs, as many as 60% of patients wind up dealing with peripheral neuropathy.
People grappling with peripheral neuropathy describe it as a burning, prickling, or pins and needles-like sensation. It’s a serious cause of pain and discomfort on top of the other symptoms that a body fighting cancer is already dealing with. Those sensations arise when sensory neurons in the outer layers of the skin are damaged, interfering with the way that mitochondria travels through them. “Depleted of energy, the neurons’ tips degenerate, dulling tactile sensation and sparking chronic pain,” the study explains.
Psychedelic renaissance
The breakthrough research on neuropathy is just the latest point of excitement in the cutting edge field of psychedelics research. Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin, long dismissed as purely recreational and blackballed in the medical world, are in the throes of a research renaissance.
The magic in magic mushrooms alone has shown promise for treating depression, anxiety, and substance use disorder in recent years, with more research on the way. In May, the VA announced a new clinical trial to evaluate MDMA as a treatment for PTSD in veterans — a threshold of legitimacy once unthinkable for a substance best known as a club drug.
Beyond psychiatric conditions, the new study in Nature shows that psychedelics could unlock powerful treatments in the broader medical world too. According to the study’s authors, the lauded Texas cancer center is pursuing many novel applications for drugs once written off by the medical establishment.
“These findings offer important insights into how psilocybin may protect nerves before damage occurs, rather than treating symptoms after they become persistent,” Amit said. “At UT MD Anderson, we are actively exploring the multiple facets of psychedelics to pursue interventions that improve the lives of our patients.”
