Dr. Nolan Williams

So MDMA appears to in one to a few MDMA sessions have an anti PTSD effect that seems to be

you know, outside of the kind of standard assumed levels of PTSD improvement that you can observe in individuals with this level of PTSD.

Right.

So.

It's about two-thirds of people had a clinically significant change in their PTSD symptoms.

It appears to last for a while.

In the earlier trials where they followed people out, it seemed to last for kind of in the years range for some people.

And so it's pretty compelling.

In contrast with ketamine, which only on average lasts about a week and a half for a single infusion.

for some people or they end up getting like a bunch of doses for a couple of weeks and then for some people that seems to last a while.

You know, that's where I think the psilocybin story for depression and the MDMA story for PTSD seem more interesting to me.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's, you know, in open-label studies, it's closer to like half to two-thirds of people end up getting better depending upon their level of treatment resistance.

In the blinded trials, it was more like a third or so of people.

Yeah, definitely.

So David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris' work around neuroimaging psychedelics are kind of some of the first folks to do that work.

And to their great surprise, they thought there was going to be an increase in activity on psychedelics, and what they found is the opposite, right?

There's kind of an overall decrease in the level of activity in the brain with psychedelics.

But they have also looked at connectivity, and there's this kind of small world way

you know large world connectivity that you you think about and so you know small world meaning there's a lot there's kind of a much more kind of focused kind of cortical function or you know subcortical function or whatever it is and uh and what you see is a difference in that um in that level of engagement of brain regions so the connectivity kind of global connectivity kind of increases and so it's interesting you know i think