Experts say drugs created for treating mental disorders or drug abuse can be somewhat hit and miss, with doctors unable to control or predict the exact outcomes. However, new research involving psychedelic drugs like LSD is revealing patterns for precisely how mood-altering drugs work in the brain, which may allow doctors to prescribe drugs that create the exact responses they hope for.

The research, conducted at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and published in the journal Neuron, is revealing the differences in the way psychedelic drugs, like LSD, and non-psychedelic drugs act toward brain receptors. As an additional result, psychedelic drugs may help open doors to more targeted treatments for disorders of the brain or mental illness, without the negative side effects.

Psychedelic drugs are substances that bring things from a person’s unconscious into conscious awareness, creating images, dreamlike visions or hallucinations. Aside from the well-known LSD and other synthetic hallucinogens, psychedelic drugs can be found in natural forms of some mushrooms, extracts from peyote cactus and the iboga root. The drugs have been used for years in scientific research to help unravel processes occurring in the mind. They can be injected, smoked, eaten or absorbed through membranes.

Hallucinogens like LSD are similar in chemical makeup to non-hallucinogens, like lisuride, often used to treat Parkinson’s disease. What scientists didn’t know, however, was how the two types of drugs act on the serotonin 2A receptors of the brain. Receptors are proteins that activate responses at the cell level, such as the feel-good effects produced by serotonin. When serotonin levels are out of balance, disorders like depression and several mental illnesses can occur.

Researchers in the study looked at how hallucinogenic drugs actually turn on the serotonin 2A receptor in mice, because non-hallucinogenic drugs can also activate the serotonin 2A receptor but without the same effects on behavior or feelings. Study co-author Stuart C. Sealfon, MD, said unlike non-psychedelic drugs, hallucinogenic drugs do more than just activate the serotonin receptor. These drugs also activate an additional neurological path.

Furthermore, there are two ways the serotonin 2A receptor can be activated. Hallucinogens cause the receptor to go one way
and non-hallucinogens cause it to go another. In another finding from the study, researchers learned that while the serotonin 2A is activated upon within the cerebral cortex, it is not activated by cells traveling to it. Prior to the study, it was believed that drugs like LSD traveled to the cerebral cortex – the part of the brain that helps control attention, speech and memory.

Using this information, scientists will continue to study the precise patters of activation for serotonin 2A. Ultimately, they can begin manipulating how they want to activate brain receptors for exact outcomes when treating psychiatric disorders or drug abuse cases, rather than prescribing a drug without knowing whether or not it will achieve treatment goals.