Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
Could MDMA, the active ingredient in the psychoactive drug Ecstasy, be used to treat social anxiety in autistic adults? That’s what researchers from the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center are trying to discover in a new study.
According to the New York Daily News, the substance has already been shown to increase a person’s confidence level, make them more likely to bond with one-another and improve their understanding of social cues. These combined factors could reduce overall social anxiety, co-author Alicia Danforth and her colleagues told the newspaper on Tuesday.
Danforth emphasizes that her team’s research is “not another quack treatment” for autism and related conditions, nor is it an attempt to find a miracle cure for the condition. Rather, they are hoping to measure MDMA’s effect on social anxiety, and are using a purified version of the substance that is much safer than what is found in street drugs.
How the experiment works
In a US Food and Drug Administration-approved pilot study, the researchers began screening autistic adults to find a dozen subjects, all of whom were over the age of 21 and had attended college for at least two years.
Approved subjects are then asked to attend multiple therapy sessions to prepare for the “shift in consciousness” that will result from taking the drug, Danforth said. The MDMA is then given to eight subjects, under supervision, twice per month while the other four receive a placebo. They are then either allowed to listen to music or asked to interact with research-team members.
After a period of six months, the participants and the researchers review how the drug has affected participants, and then members of the placebo group are allowed to begin taking MDMA. Thus far, seven people have been given either MDMA or a placebo in the study, according to the newspaper. A paper discussing the research in more detail appears in the journal Progress and Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry.
As the authors explain in that paper MDMA “catalyzes shifts toward openness and introspection that do not require ongoing administration to achieve lasting benefits,” and using it in adults with autism “may provide a significant advantage over medications that require daily dosing.” Use of the substance, they added, could allow doctors to “employ new treatment models” for anxiety in “the context of a supportive and integrative psychotherapy protocol.”
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