ArticleMolecular psychiatry2024
Psilocybin restrains activity-based anorexia in female rats by enhancing cognitive flexibility: contributions from 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A receptor mechanisms.
Article in Molecular psychiatry, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 32 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
32 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 40 citations in OpenAlex.
- Psilocybin in the treatment of eating disorders: a systematic review of the literature and registered clinical trials.Eating and weight disorders : EWD · 2025Pooled it
- Effects of psilocybin on personality, psychiatric symptoms, and values: Exploring mediating effects of the acute psychedelic experience.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2026Trial
- Prior trauma shapes the effects of psilocybin on stress sensitization in mice.Neuroscience letters · 2026Article
- Psychedelics do not always enhance cognitive flexibility: The potential role of time-varying effects on reward learning processes.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2026Review
- Psilocybin modulates social behaviour in male and female mice in a time-dependent manner.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Article
- Neural circuits regulating activity-based anorexia.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Review
- The development of FEDUPP: feeding experimentation device users processing package to assess learning and cognitive flexibility.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy for Adolescent Anorexia Nervosa: Clinical Considerations and Emerging Models of Care.Current psychiatry reports · 2026Review
- Learning as the unifying mechanism of psychedelic action.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2026Review
- Effects of a single dose of psilocybin on diet-induced weight loss in obese mice.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Pretreatment with the psychedelic DOI mitigates LPS-induced hippocampal inflammation and behavioral impairments in mice.BMC neuroscience · 2026Article
- Article
- Short- and long-term modulation of rat prefrontal cortical activity following single doses of psilocybin.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Article
- The ABCs of psychedelics: a preclinical roadmap for drug discovery.Trends in pharmacological sciences · 2025Review
- Psilocybin alters visual contextual computations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Psilocybin during the postpartum period induces long-lasting adverse effects in both mothers and offspring.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Psychedelics and the Serotonin Hypothesis of Eating Disorders.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- The Medial Prefrontal Cortex Modulates Psychedelic-like Effects of Psilocin.ACS pharmacology & translational science · 2025Article
- Unraveling psilocybin's therapeutic potential: behavioral and neuroplasticity insights in Wistar-Kyoto and Wistar male rat models of treatment-resistant depression.Psychopharmacology · 2025Article
- Psilocybin-enhanced fear extinction linked to bidirectional modulation of cortical ensembles.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Psilocybin has shown promise for alleviating symptoms of depression and is currently in clinical trials for the treatment of anorexia nervosa (AN), a condition that is characterised by persistent cognitive inflexibility. Considering that enhanced cognitive flexibility after psilocybin treatment is reported to occur in individuals with depression, it is plausible that psilocybin could improve symptoms of AN by breaking down cognitive inflexibility. A mechanistic understanding of the actions of psilocybin is required to tailor the clinical application of psilocybin to individuals most likely to respond with positive outcomes. This can only be achieved using incisive neurobiological approaches in animal models. Here, we use the activity-based anorexia (ABA) rat model and comprehensively assess aspects of reinforcement learning to show that psilocybin (post-acutely) improves body weight maintenance in female rats and facilitates cognitive flexibility, specifically via improved adaptation to the initial reversal of reward contingencies. Further, we reveal the involvement of signalling through the serotonin (5-HT) 1 A and 5-HT2A receptor subtypes in specific aspects of learning, demonstrating that 5-HT1A antagonism negates the cognitive enhancing effects of psilocybin. Moreover, we show that psilocybin elicits a transient increase and decrease in cortical transcription of these receptors (Htr2a and Htr1a, respectively), and a further reduction in the abundance of Htr2a transcripts in rats exposed to the ABA model. Together, these findings support the hypothesis that psilocybin could ameliorate cognitive inflexibility in the context of AN and highlight a need to better understand the therapeutic mechanisms independent of 5-HT2A receptor binding.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.