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Oral Presentation 2
1:30 PM to 3:00 PM
- Presenter
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- Trang Thi Tran, Senior, Psychology Mary Gates Scholar
- Mentors
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- Sheri Mizumori, Psychology
- Victoria Hones, Psychology
- Session
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Session O-2J: Substance Use Disorders and Psychoactive Agents
- MGH 171 MP
- 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM
The focus of psychedelic research has been on psilocybin during the last decade, revealing positive implications for the future of psychiatry. Psilocybin has recently emerged as a potential therapeutic breakthrough for major depressive disorder, with a favorable profile of rapid-acting, long-lasting effects, and non-addictive properties. Given the high comorbidity and overlapping symptoms betweeen depression and opiate withdrawal, this recent advancement in depression treatment can be utilized to gain new insights into opiate withdrawal and its potential treatment. Recent research has also assessed psilocybin for treatment of nicotine and alcohol cessation, which showed promising results. The present study hypothesizes that psilocybin treatment alleviates anhedonic behaviors related to naloxone-induced morphine withdrawal and restores baseline behavior in rats. We examine morphine withdrawal symptoms and the efficacy of psilocybin using the open field test and sucrose preference test. Behavioral markers for anhedonic morphine withdrawal symptoms are extracted and quantified using DeepLabCut, a novel deep machine learning algorithm. Our preliminary data showed that psilocybin attenuated the overall effects of morphine withdrawal on locomotor activities, in support of our hypothesis. Since hundreds of thousands of lives are lost and affected by addiction every year in the U.S, there is an urgent call for new, effective treatments for substance use disorders. This study aids our understanding of opiate withdrawal and its untapped potential therapeutic treatment.