FactsDontLie

The World Economic Forum’s “cyber pandemic” may be entering its opening stages. Five European countries were just hit by cyberattacks that disrupted supermarket refrigerators and freezers—just weeks after Bill Gates said “over the next year, we are going to have a lot of NEGATIVE SURPRISES” from AI cyberattacks. Hackers manipulated refrigeration settings to as high as 122°F, causing widespread food spoilage. This may explain why governments around the world recently urged citizens to prepare several days’ worth of food and emergency supplies.

Happy International Doge Day! " Do Only Good Everyday. " 🐕

Effects of the antidepressants desipramine and fluvoxamine on latency to immobility and duration of immobility in the forced swim test in adult male C57BL/6J mice dlvr.it/Q49Q3Z #behaviour #pharma

Is there a way to improve the effects of antidepressants in treatment resistant cases? Thomas et al. show that olanzapine (an anti-psychotic) amplifies the antidepressant effects of venlafaxine in mice during the forced swim test. bit.ly/2RM1PRi

In the social sciences one of the methods they use to test depression is to throw mice into a tank of water with no possibility of escape and see how long they swim before finally giving up. On antidepressants they will swim a little longer so they say the depression was cured.

Mice given a shot of a dead, harmless bacterium kept moving longer when dropped into a beaker of water. Twelve hours after the injection they spent less time floating motionless, the same shift antidepressant drugs produce in this test. Every result in this study comes from mice. Lowry's group at the University of Bristol, working with colleagues at University College London, published the work in Neuroscience in 2007. The bacterium was Mycobacterium vaccae, a relative of the germ behind tuberculosis that causes no disease and lives off dead and decaying matter. Mice first got two priming doses, four weeks and two weeks ahead. Then they were given a heat-killed dose under the skin or into the windpipe. The mouse dose was a tenth of the amount used in earlier human trials. Inside the brain, the bacterium switched on a small cluster of serotonin-making cells deep in the brainstem, in a patch called the interfascicular dorsal raphe. Serotonin is the chemical messenger many antidepressants act on. Those cells send wiring forward. At 12 hours after the shot, serotonin turnover rose in the prefrontal cortex, the region behind the forehead that the authors tie to coping with stress. Egg-white protein, a trigger for a different kind of immune response, left the same cells alone. In the swim test each mouse spent six minutes in water 14 cm deep, and an observer who did not know its treatment timed how long it stayed still. Primed mice given the bacterium stayed still for less time than primed mice given salt water, with eight mice per group. Retested at 36 hours, the gap had closed. Mice that had never been primed showed no change at all, so the effect needed the earlier priming shots. A mouse paddling longer in a beaker is a standard screen for antidepressant drugs, and a long way from a person feeling better. Every dose went in by needle. Earlier cancer trials using the same heat-killed preparation had reported unexpected gains in patients' quality of life scores, and that is partly why the team predicted a mood effect. What they found in mice is a set of serotonin cells that answer to the immune system and are separate from the ones that respond to anxiety and stress. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1736…

🤔 The 12-hour logistical nightmare Psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA have dominated the psychiatric narrative, but they share a massive bottleneck: time. A standard psilocybin dosing session requires two trained facilitators and monopolizes an entire clinic room for 4 to 12 hours. That model is incredibly expensive and hard to scale. Enter 5-MeO-DMT (mebufotenin). It’s a potent 5-HT1A and 5-HT2A agonist with a unique pharmacokinetic profile. The psychedelic effects peak in 10 minutes and completely resolve in about 45 to 60 minutes. If the antidepressant efficacy holds up, the clinical footprint shrinks from a full day to a standard morning appointment.

Depression is no laughing matter for some. As bizarre as this sounds, I hope something can help them. sciencealert.com/scientists-…