In person at UCL - 26 Bedford Way, Room 448
Zoom link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/94324808976
Microdosing is the practice of regularly using low doses of psychedelic drugs. We developed ‘self-blinding’, a novel paradigm where voluntary citizen scientists implement their own placebo control without clinical supervision. Using this method, we conducted one of the largest placebo-controlled trial on psychedelics to-date (n=191). Small, but significant microdose-placebo differences were observed, however the trial suffered from weak blinding. To incorporate low blinding quality into the interpretation of trial results, we developed a novel analytical technique, the Correct Guess Rate Curve (CGRC), that can estimate what would be the outcome of a perfectly blinded trial based on data from an imperfectly blinded trial. The application CGRC argues that the observed placebo-microdose differences are likely to be false positives created by weak blinding. Beyond its implications for microdosing, these results suggest that placebo-controlled studies that do not assess blinding quality are more fallible than conventionally assumed.
Placebo effects are also influencing psychedelic assisted therapy, i.e. macrodoing; however in this case blinding is near impossible due to conspicuous drug effects. To estimate the effect of positive expectancy, we analyzed the relationship between pre-treatment expectancy and therapeutic outcomes from the recent psilocybin vs. escitalopram trial. In the escitalopram arm increased expectations were associated with improved outcomes, but surprisingly the same association was not found in the psilocybin arm. The inverse relationship was found with respect to suggestibility: increased suggestibility was associated with better outcomes in the psilocybin arm, but not in the escitalopram arm. Lastly, the implications of these results for psychedelic medicine and future research directions will be discussed.
Balázs Szigeti:
Balázs has a physics degree from Imperial College and earned a PhD in computational neuroscience from the University of Edinburgh. After graduating, he spent a few years as a biomedical software engineer at the Icahn Institute of Genetics in New York. He became involved with psychedelics science in 2016, when he invented 'self-blinding', a novel methodology that enables self-experimenters to implement their own placebo control without clinical supervision. Using this methodology, Balázs lead the self-blinding microdose study, the largest placebo-controlled study on psychedelics microdosing to-date. Balázs continues to look at the interaction of placebo and expectancy effects in psychedelics, both micro- and microdosing, using innovative experimental designs and modern data science techniques.