text_1: Single Dose of Hallucinogenic Drug Psilocybin Relieves Anxiety and Depression in Patients with Advanced Cancer
text_2: This release focuses on a recent study that found a single application of the hallucinogen psilocybin is effective at providing meaningful relief to cancer patients suffering from severe depression or anxiety. The release notes that 80 percent of participants showed improvement based on clinical evaluation scores for anxiety and depression for several months following the treatment. The study is one of two on the subject that were published recently in the Journal of Psychopharmacology (our review of the release for the other study can be found here and a review of a related news article can be read here.) The release does better than its counterpart in terms of addressing conflicts of interest and placing the work in context with previous work in the field. However, the release uses only vague language when addressing the key issues of health benefits and adverse side effects. More specifics on the degree of reduced anxiety and depression scores would have been useful. Because this study and its counterpart offer an intriguing finding — that a single dose of something could be so helpful in alleviating depression — we’ve completed three reviews related to these studies: one on a news story from the LA Times, one on a news release from Johns Hopkins, and this review on the release from NYU. And the core issues involved are similar across all three items. Cancer is a widespread health problem that affects many millions of Americans. According to the National Cancer Institute, just under 1.7 million people in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer in 2016 alone. If you consider that each of those people has a family and loved ones who are also affected by the diagnosis, you can begin to appreciate the scope of the problem. According to a report from the National Institutes of Health’s 2002 State-of-the-Science Conference on Symptom Management in Cancer: Pain, Depression, and Fatigue, “The clinical ‘rule of thumb’ is that 25 percent of cancer patients are likely depressed enough at some point in the course of disease to warrant evaluation and treatment.” This makes it especially important for research institutions and news outlets to write responsibly about studies like those discussed in this release. You want to give readers enough information to help them make informed decisions. You don’t want to raise false hopes, or sensationalize the work. We think all three summaries on this growing body of research reported responsibly on the findings.