How Monash researchers safely delivered the world’s largest psychedelic brain study
A landmark five-year study led by Professor Adeel Razi from the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health in the Monash School of Psychological Sciences, has found psychedelics reorganise brain patterns, giving clinicians powerful new insights into their therapeutic potential.
Published in leading scientific journal Nature, the research is the world’s largest single-site brain-imaging study of the acute effects of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms.
But before researchers could see how psilocybin reorganises the brain and to safely guide participants through the experience, they first established a safety protocol covering participant screening, preparation, dosing and medical oversight. Professor Suresh Sundram who is co-author of the landmark study, from the Department of Psychiatry at the School of Clinical Sciences at Monash Health, then provided clinical oversight throughout the study itself, ensuring these protocol standards were strictly maintained from initial screening to dosing and drug administration. This central clinical component led the study to be both possible and successful.
“By providing robust medical oversight throughout the experience, we gave participants total safety and confidence, which ultimately allowed us to capture a remarkably clean, reliable neuroimaging dataset”, according to Professor Sundram.
Prof Suresh Sundram
The study known as PsiConnect, recruited healthy adults aged 18 to 55 who had no previous psychedelic experience producing subjective effects. This was critical to capture what happens in the brain during a person’s first psychedelic experience, rather than relying on participants who were familiar with psychedelics. This made the screening process particularly important.
The eventual cohort comprised 65 healthy adults, with 62 completing both the baseline and psilocybin imaging sessions. A standardised 19 mg oral dose of psilocybin rather than an adjusted dose according to body weight was used as weight-adjusted dosing was found to have no clear advantage in previous research.
Once dosed, researchers used brain imaging to understand what happened in the brains of 62 healthy adults using psilocybin during rest, meditation and while they were listening to music and watching a movie.
The care taken over the clinical oversight allowed researchers to investigate something previous studies have struggled to capture: the relationship between a person’s subjective psychedelic experience and changes occurring across the brain. The resulting dataset is the largest single-site acute-phase psychedelic neuroimaging dataset to date.