Research into psilocybin’s promise as a mental health treatment is expanding beyond mood disorders. In a new study, researchers found that participants who consumed a psychedelic substance in therapy reported a reduction in stress and an improvement in their sleep quality. The findings were published in Current Reports in Psychiatry.

Psilocybin is a natural compound found in certain types of mushrooms, often called «magic mushrooms.» When ingested, psilocybin is converted in the body to psilocin, which interacts with serotonin receptors in the brain. This interaction leads to changes in perception, perception and perception. These effects are often described as psychedelic, producing vivid visual and auditory experiences, changes in self-awareness, and deep emotional or spiritual understanding.

Scientists are particularly interested in psilocybin because of its potential to treat mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. Unlike conventional antidepressants, which can take weeks to show effects and often require long-term use, psilocybin has been shown in early studies to produce rapid and lasting improvement in mood after a single session. or just two. This has led researchers to investigate its mechanisms of action.

The new study, led by Matthew J. Reid and Robin Carhart-Harris, aimed to better understand whether psilocybin improves the quality of sleep and whether early sleep disturbances influence the antidepressant effects of psilocybin.

«My research is focused on understanding the relationship between sleep disruption and mental health, and how sleep how does it fit into the therapeutic process.»

«In particular, I’m interested in how we can use sleep as a new therapeutic tool to replace medical treatments or improve their effectiveness. Exploring how this relationship can be expanded and intervened while psychedelic seemed natural, and I was surprised that no one had examined how psilocybin affects long-term sleep.

The researchers recruited 653 participants who planned to attend psilocybin-guided sessions, such as retreats or ceremonial experiences, making this one of the largest studies ever to investigate the use of psilocybin. of psilocybin in natural, non-clinical settings.

About 60 percent of participants encountered the possibility of major depression, with the average level of depression falling into the mild to moderate range. Sleep disturbances were nearly universal, with all participants reporting some sleep-related issues. Insomnia, especially difficulty falling asleep, was the most common sleep complaint, followed by hypersomnia and early awakening. Notably, for 26% of participants, sleep problems were their most severe depressive symptom.

«We were very surprised to find that sleep symptoms appeared to moderate the level of depressive symptoms among this group,» Reid told PsyPost. «Sleep disturbance is a frequent symptom of depression, but here, sleep disturbance was the strongest symptom of depression—even stronger than symptoms such as ‘ feeling down or sad,’ which we normally associate with depression.»

Consistent with previous studies, researchers found that psilocybin reduced depressive symptoms in participants. By two weeks after the session, depression symptoms had decreased by an average of 33%, and by four weeks, they had decreased by more than 50%. These improvements were more pronounced in participants who started with severe depression.

Sleep disturbances also improved after the use of psilocybin, although the changes were less pronounced than those observed for depression. Participants reported a modest but statistically significant reduction in problems such as insomnia and early awakening. These improvements were visible in two weeks and remained stable for four weeks.

«There seems to be a small but reliable improvement in sleep after the administration of psilocybin in the treatment area,» Reid explained. It is still unclear whether this is due to the drug itself or something indirect, and we cannot tell that from the data.

An important finding was the relationship between basic sleep disturbances and depression outcomes. Participants who had severe sleep problems at baseline were less likely to find relief from depression, even if their depression symptoms improved.

For example, people with insomnia or hypersomnia were less likely to recover completely. This suggests that sleep disturbances may interfere with the therapeutic effects of psilocybin, which may be an obstacle to obtaining optimal results.

«Those with poor sleep seem to benefit less from psilocybin administration, which may have important implications for future clinical applications,» Reid told PsyPost. «But it’s not clear why this happens, and we need to study this in more detail.»

Studies highlight the importance of sleep meditation as a factor in psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy. However, as with all research, there are limitations to consider.

The lack of a control group makes it difficult to isolate the effects of psilocybin from other factors, such as the supportive recovery environment or participants’ expectations. Similarly, natural settings have introduced differences in dosing, retreat protocols, and participant populations. Although this method improves the validity of the ecological study, it also complicates efforts to reach accurate conclusions about the effects of psilocybin.

Reid said: «It is important to remember that these results were obtained ‘in the field’ from people who voluntarily administered psilocybin. «This was not a controlled trial conducted in a laboratory setting, like a clinical trial, so we need to account for the potential bias, uncertainty, and low noise ratio inherent in this type of naturalistic research.»

The long-term goals of this research method are to «continue to explore what role sleep, if any, may play in the mechanisms of psychedelic therapy,» Reid explained. «We have several studies underway in that area and hope to share more findings soon.»

The study, «Preliminary Evidence of Sleep Improvement Following Psilocybin Administration, and Its Implications for the Treatment of Depression,» was written by Matthew J. Reid, Hannes Kettner, Tessa F. Blanken, Brandon Weiss, and Robin Carhart-Harris.

By 2024, healthcare organizations experienced the most expensive cyber attacks, costing nearly $10 million.¹ And with the proliferation of ransomware and piracy tools, healthcare will continue to be targeted by such attacks.

«[Threat actors] they try to extort payments from organizations. That’s a trend we’re seeing,» said Ryan Witt, Proofpoint’s vice president of industry solutions and chairman of the company’s healthcare consumer advisory board.

Chief information security officials are also concerned about data loss caused by insiders, compromised accounts and careless users with unsecured email. , remote work applications, cloud computing and productivity platforms.²

Advanced security measures are needed to protect patient information from AI-enhanced ransomware, phishing and insider threats and to ensure the integrity of healthcare systems. Understanding the current health threat landscape is the first step to adopting a human-centered, data security approach.

Protecting data starts with people

Today, attackers attack people, not technology. That’s where cybersecurity leaders should focus their attention and resources.

«The economy of cybercrime is based on how victims interact,» said Brian Reed, senior director of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint. «It’s a lot less hassle to go in and socially engineer a victim or design a hacking trap than it is to spend time and energy building, testing and releasing holiday spoilers.»

Reed estimates that in healthcare, like many other industries, about 80% of attacks focus on human factors rather than technical weaknesses. «Most of those data loss cases are good people making bad decisions,» he said. According to Reed, the most common such threats are:

• Ransomware attacks, which often include prompting to install a browser extension, click a link or download an application;
• Compromising commercial email, including covert attempts to get users to take action outside of their normal course of action; and
• Loss of data due to malicious, compromised or negligent individuals.

To prevent accidental and inadvertent data loss

Typically, cyber security refers to the ability to catch vulnerabilities, stop phishing attempts and identify social engineering attempts before they reach end users. However, the significant increase in endpoints and the proliferation of cloud computing across the healthcare environment and an ever-changing workforce that may include part-time workers and mobile nurses have increased the need for cloud solutions. data loss protection (DLP).

Evidence of 2024 Data Loss Zone the report said that 70% of respondents say that careless users are the main cause of data loss and breach of control.³ Image of Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigation Report found that 68% of crimes involve «a harmless human element, such as someone falling for a social engineering attack or making a mistake.»⁴ To illustrate this point, a 2023 report from Tessian (now a Proofpoint company) found that about a third of employees send about two emails to the wrong recipient a year and a year.⁵

DLP solutions recognize that preventing data loss from the inside is just as important as stopping external access. Many methods use an advanced matching method to try to identify important data that may be accidentally or intentionally generated before it leaves the network. Advanced DLP goes a long way; large language models can look through billions of records and sort out important information by understanding the context and relationships between files and directories.

Joshua Linkenhoker, a Proofpoint business security consultant, said these models can scan e-mails or files being transmitted to identify links that may contain sensitive information. Even more powerfully, AI can be trained on human behavior to stop hard to catch mistakes like accepting the wrong email submission for an email recipient. Linkenhoker calls it «behavior-driven action.»

Get data output from email, cloud and endpoints

Real-time AI applications add a powerful role to automation. Every time an employee is guided to make the right choice about handling sensitive data, a potential breach of law is avoided.

Behavioral AI can also train users to think twice before transferring data to an unsecured cloud storage folder or sharing a sensitive file via OneDrive or SharePoint. Witt believes that cloud-based productivity systems designed specifically to share information have become a major threat to healthcare.

Reed acknowledged that it’s one thing to anticipate targeted cybercriminal movements, but it’s much harder to anticipate the performance, if not security, of overburdened healthcare workers.

Of course, he added, AI behavior can also stop strange behavior with bad intentions. When an unsuspecting user starts renaming important financial files «family pictures.zip,» moving them to a USB drive and deleting them from a local drive, it’s clear that this type of overreach is not guilty. And without the ability to use scalable AI to detect suspicious behavior, it’s difficult to identify inside actors.

With the increasing number of endpoints and monitoring stations, specialized information security solutions have increased. While a «security in depth» approach is important, the volume of data sources can make it more difficult for healthcare security analysts to analyze events in real time and understand actions. of people according to the context.

Evidence-based research has shown that nearly 70% of IT professionals surveyed rank visibility into sensitive data, user behavior, and external threats as the most important capabilities of malware prevention programs. data loss.⁶ It’s a complex problem because information security analysts need to see both depth and breadth at the same time, also known as visibility at scale.

When information flows from different sources are combined, health care organizations can go from protecting against known, commercial attacks to preventing the most advanced, designed and unanticipated operations. That provides the opportunity to use AI across information silos to achieve a real-time, 360-degree view of the threat environment.

«Now you have to go find the needle in the haystack,» Witt said. «You need that level of full visibility, that level of analytics, that level of AI that sees a small number of interactions…. You’re capturing a very small fraction of the total traffic, but it’s so small. it’s really important.»

Download the Proofpoint-HIMSS white paper on adopting a human-centered approach to healthcare data security Here.

References

1. IBM and Ponemon Institute. 2024. Cost of Information Crisis Report 2024. https://www.ibm.com/reports/data-breach.

2. Proofpoint and CyberEdge. 2024. 2024 site of data loss. https://www.proofpoint.com/us/resources/threat-reports/data-loss-landscape.

3. Ibid.

4. Verizon. 2024. Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report 2024. https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/.

5. Evidence. 2024. To change DLP [eBook]. https://www.proofpoint.com/sites/default/files/e-books/pfpt-us-eb-rethinking-dlp.pdf.

6. Proofpoint and CyberEdge, 2024 site of data loss.

Renewed fighting in the past week led by the terrorist group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and other armed groups has engulfed parts of Aleppo, Idlib and Hama, disrupting the stability that had been change from 2020.

The spokesman for the United Nations Office for Human Rights (OHCHR) Jeremy Laurence told reporters in Geneva about «a number of incidents related to accidents that caused many casualties to civilians, including a high number of women and children, caused by attacks by HTS and pro-Government forces». .

He added: «These wars cause damage and destruction of public goods, including health facilities, facilities that provide educational institutions and food markets.»

University dorms take a beating

OHCHR has launched an investigation into the deadly attacks on civilians including the deaths of four unemployed men on 29 November, «reportedly as a result of multiple HTS-based artillery» hit the student housing complex of Aleppo university, said the OHCHR spokesman. .

«According to the information gathered by our Office, all the victims were university students, and after that, many other students ran away university center,» he added.

Access to aid remains ‘fluid’

Jens Laerke, spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), stressed that the situation in the region is «fluid and constantly changing». While OCHA has been running «very robust» communications systems inside Syria and across the border with the humanitarian aid center in Gaziantep, Türkiye, it has been forced to suspend its operations «due to insecurity,» while the battle is still going on and many paths are going on. closed.

However, «not the whole area is locked,» he said. «There are still places where we can respond, for example, in the reception centers in Idlib” for people uprooted by violence.

According to OCHA, others 16.7 million Syrians were in need of humanitarian assistance by the beginning of 2024.

Airstrike Victims

OHCHR spokesperson Mr. Laurence also highlighted the incident of December 1 where 22 civilians were killed, including three women and seven children, and at least 40 others were injured, «reportedly due to several airstrikes carried out by pro-Government forces in Idlib» that reached the local market and five residential areas in the city.

«We remind everyone of their responsibilities and obligations under international human rights law and humanitarian law: citizens and public buildings must be protected,» he stressed.

Echoing this call, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria warned in a statement on Tuesday that «the atrocities of the past years must not be repeated, or Syria will be driven. a new way of cruelty«.

Health care was overwhelmed

Looking at the poor health situation in the northwestern areas, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) Representative in Syria, Christina Bethke, said that the referral hospitals, from which many patients are sent to leave Aleppo by «courageous first responders» like the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, «overwhelmed» by the stressful situation.

«Thousands of accidents have been received in the last four days alone«he said, while doctors and nurses «are working day and night to save lives, even if they put themselves and their families at great risk, they choose to stay instead of fleeing».

Speaking from Damascus, Mrs. Bethke emphasized that «insecurity and travel restrictions have forced about 65 non-governmental organizations that previously worked in Aleppo and Idlib to stop their activities» , leaving health facilities overwhelmed or dysfunctional.

«That includes one of Idlib’s largest hospitals, Bab al-Hawa, and Al Razi Hospital in Aleppo, both of which have been reduced to serving only emergency cases and» leaving many patients without know nothing.

Aleppo’s hospitals are often closed

In Aleppo city, home to more than two million people, more than 100 health centers were operating last week. «Today, less than eight hospitals continue to operate on a limited basis«Ms. Bethke said.

He added that Monday’s airstrikes in Idlib caused significant damage to health care facilities including the University Hospital, the Maternity Hospital and the local health system.

Since 27 November, the WHO has received reports of at least six health care attacks in Syria. Mrs. Bethke also stated that medical facilities are protected under international humanitarian law.

A huge legacy of conflict

Syria’s health system has been battered by nearly 14 years of armed conflict and a WHO official said public health concerns were «escalating» amid the crisis, including increased risk of water-borne diseases and respiratory diseases in crowded settlements. Aleppo and Idlib were at the center of the 2022-2023 cholera crisis in Syria and the 2023 earthquake damaged the already fragile water and sanitation networks.

Many Syrian families have been on the move, including an estimated half a million people who entered the country from Lebanon in the past two months, fleeing the deadly conflict there.

Some of them are on the move again due to the escalation of fighting in the northwest and their situation is increasing with the onset of winter. By the beginning of 2024, 7.2 million people were internally displaced in Syria, almost half of them in the northwest, where the escalation of weapons is creating difficulties in providing life-saving assistance.