Small MDMA trial shows promise for chronic pain
In a recent presentation Wavepaths , I mentioned at the end some very interesting data involving chronic pain and psychedelics that I recently heard on the Psychedelics Today podcast (where I first heard an interview with Mendel Kaelen(!). It was an interview with Dr. Devon Christie and Will Siu, MD and they brought up a data request that they had submitted to MAPS to see accessory data from the MP16 MDMA safety trial in 2016, right before the start of the Phase III trial.
They found within the relatively smaller group of 35 participants, all of whom had been diagnosed with severe PTSD, approximately 84% suffered from chronic pain, which is consistent with the clinical knowledge that 50-80% of all PTSD sufferers have chronic pain. And they further discovered in that study's participant pool, it could be split into three clusters of severity; lowest, middle, highest, though all of them were rated severe against the general background of PTSD suffers.
Fascinatingly, the middle cluster had the highest self-ratings for chronic pain and after five months at the end of the study, their Chronic Pain Grade Scale (CPGS) scores had dropped the most (P<0.5). What's equally fascinating here is that all those participants had no "expectation bias" to this result since it was not a stated outcome that was part of the study design, so they were blinded to that expectation and outcome. Dr. Christie gets rolling on that study and outcome at 23:40.
Give it a listen.