Heart risks, serotonin, and fen-phen: 5 questions for 5-HT receptor researcher Bryan Roth

The weekly online 'magazine', the Microdose, has just published this interview: "Bryan Roth got interested in psychedelics by accident. After finishing his biochemistry PhD dissertation on opiate receptors, he started a postdoctoral research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. There, his advisor suggested he study what was then a little-known group of receptors called 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT), or serotonin receptors. Roth’s research led him to two particularly interesting classes of drugs that interact with those receptors: psychedelic drugs, which serve as “agonists” and activate the receptor, and atypical antipsychotic drugs, which do the opposite. His first paper on 5-HT receptors was published in 1984, and he has published dozens of papers on the subject since … Most psychedelics, including psilocybin, MDMA, LSD, DMT, and mescaline, also act on serotonin receptors. The Microdose spoke with Roth about what we know about drugs that stimulate 5-HT receptors and their effect on the heart … At some point, the FDA is probably going to mandate those sorts of trials be done, but it’s not clear from the current draft guidance if they’re going to mandate that for planned phase 3 clinical trials or not. All those studies have one or two doses of psilocybin. If I were a betting man, I would say there’s little chance that that type of dosing would be an issue, but we still need to do clinical trials. The big concern is with repeated dosing, and lots of people are doing that now with microdosing. That’s extraordinarily risky until the appropriate studies have been done."

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