A method using high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with an acetonitrile, water, and phosphoric acid mobile phase and a bonded cyano-amino-type polar phase column has been developed for the rapid, selective, and accurate quantitation of psilocybin in dry mushroom material. A simple one-step procedure is used for the quantitative extraction of psilocybin in under 60 min. The 267:254 nm ...

Psilocybin (4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is the major psychoactive alkaloid of some species of mushrooms distributed worldwide. These mushrooms represent a growing problem regarding hallucinogenic drug abuse. Despite its experimental medical use in the 1960s, only very few pharmacological data about psilocybin were known until recently. Because of its still growing capacity for abuse...

Rationale Although psilocybin has been used for centuries for religious purposes, little is known scientifically about its acute and persisting effects. Objectives This double-blind study evaluated the acute and longer-term psychological effects of a high dose of psilocybin relative to a comparison compound administered under comfortable, supportive conditions. Materials and methods The partici...

Cancer patients often develop chronic, clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety. Previous studies suggest that psilocybin may decrease depression and anxiety in cancer patients. The effects of psilocybin were studied in 51 cancer patients with life-threatening diagnoses and symptoms of depression and/or anxiety. This randomized, double-blind, cross-over trial investigated the e...

Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic and a candidate drug model of psychosis. This study measured the effects of psilocybin on resting-state network and thalamocortical functional connectivity (FC) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Fifteen healthy volunteers received intravenous infusions of psilocybin and placebo in 2 task-free resting-state scans. Primary analyses focused on ...

Stimulation of serotonergic neurotransmission by psilocybin has been shown to shift emotional biases away from negative towards positive stimuli. We have recently shown that reduced amygdala activity during threat processing might underlie psilocybin's effect on emotional processing. However, it is still not known whether psilocybin modulates bottom-up or top-down connectivity within the visual...

Responses to hallucinogenic drugs, such as psilocybin, are believed to be critically dependent on the user's personality, current mood state, drug pre-experiences, expectancies, and social and environmental variables. However, little is known about the order of importance of these variables and their effect sizes in comparison to drug dose. Hence, this study investigated the effects of 24 predi...

Recent evidence indicates that psilocybin with psychological support may be effective for treating depression. Some studies have found that patients with depression show heightened amygdala responses to fearful faces and there is reliable evidence that treatment with SSRIs attenuates amygdala responses (Ma, 2015). We hypothesised that amygdala responses to emotional faces would be altered post-...

BACKGROUND Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic drug that has a history of use in psychotherapy. One of the rationales for its use was that it aids emotional insight by lowering psychological defences. AIMS To test the hypothesis that psilocybin facilitates access to personal memories and emotions by comparing subjective and neural responses to positive autobiographical memories under psilocyb...

The hallucinogenic serotonin(1A&2A) agonist psilocybin is known for its ability to induce illusions of motion in otherwise stationary objects or textured surfaces. This study investigated the effect of psilocybin on local and global motion processing in nine human volunteers. Using a forced choice direction of motion discrimination task we show that psilocybin selectively impairs coherence sens...