A group of UK researchers have found that CBD could be the next treatment for symptoms of psychosis.
Psychosis is a condition of the mind, often leading to confusion in determining what is real and what is not. Symptoms can range from having false beliefs to seeing and hearing things that are not really there. Though the condition has been linked to long-term recreational cannabis use, a research team from King’s College London has found that CBD can actually help.
Brain scans showed that a dose of CBD could reduce the brain activity that causes people with psychosis to experience these hallucinations or false beliefs.
“There is an urgent need for a safe treatment for your people at risk of psychosis. The mainstay of current treatment for people with psychosis are drugs that were first discovered in the 1950s and unfortunately do not work for everyone,” said Dr. Sagnik Bhattacharyya, from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at the university.
“One of the main advantages of cannabidiol is that it is sage and seems to be very well tolerated, making it in some ways an ideal treatment.”
To discover how CBD would affect those with psychosis, the research team recruited 33 people seeking help for their symptoms, such as having hallucinations or delusions. A single dose of cannabis was given to 16 of the participants while the other 7 were given a placebo that looked identical to the CBD.
The researchers then watched the brain behavior as the participants performed simple tasks in a magnetic resonance imaging machine. They were asked to determine whether words such as ‘baby’ and ‘cries’ were at all related. They were also asked to recall a word that completed a pair when asked by the researchers.
The scientists compared the brain scans of those who took the CBD and those who had the placebo along with scans of healthy brains. They found that those with symptoms of psychosis had abnormal brain activity in three distinct regions of the brain which are all involved in the condition. The activity was lessened in those who took the CBD, their brains looking very similar to a healthy brain.
The research team from King’s College will now launch the first large scale trial to discover whether or not medical CBD is truly a viable and effective option for treating young people who are at risk of developing psychosis.
“If successful, this trial will provide definitive proof of cannabidiol’s role as an antipsychotic treatment and pave the way for use in the clinic,” said Dr. Bhattacharyya. “Our results have started unravelling the brain mechanisms of a new drug that works in a completely different way to traditional anti-psychotics.
The trial is expected to start early in 2019 and is backed by the Medical Research Council and the National Institute for Health Research.
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