Health Science Reviews

By Lee Fredericks

Anxiety, a feeling we all become familiar with at some point in life. Often exacerbated when life-threatening situations manifest themselves, or when needing to do a presentation. During the COVID-19 pandemic there was an estimated 27.3% prevalence of anxiety in the general population. Making it unsurprising that up to roughly one-third of cancer patients worldwide battle with anxiety, and this is not even considering the amount of people who directly battle with psychiatric anxiety disorders.

Treatment for these patients includes mainly Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs). However, these must be administered daily and do not have the desired efficacy. Meaning better treatments are needed to properly attend to these patients. To this effect, a small study has previously shown that Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) leads to long-term reductions in anxiety in patients with life-threatening illnesses. Leading these researchers to attempt to corroborate these findings and investigate if this effect is sustained in patients with psychiatric anxiety disorders without life-threatening illness.

They did this by performing a 2-centre, double-blind, placebo-controlled study with a 2-period, random-order crossover design. Meaning that each participant will receive the treatment and the placebo in a randomized order during each respective treatment period. During these periods, participants have 2 treatment sessions, followed by monitoring for 16 weeks, with the main endpoint being anxiety symptoms at 16 weeks after the last treatment measured using the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-Global score.

The results were profoundly promising in that anxiety symptoms were reduced for patients both with and without life-threatening illness at the 16-week endpoint. This was also the first-time effects were shown to last this long and some of their data even hints at effects lasting as long as 12 months. Meaning hope remains for a long-term anxiety treatment.

References

Getie, A., Ayalneh, M. and Bimerew, M. (2025). Global prevalence and determinant factors of pain, depression, and anxiety among cancer patients: an umbrella review of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. BMC Psychiatry, 25(1). doi:https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-025-06599-5.

Holze, F., Gasser, P., Müller, F., Dolder, P.C. and Liechti, M.E. (2022). Lysergic acid diethylamide-assisted therapy in patients with anxiety with and without a life-threatening illness A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase II study. Biological Psychiatry, [online] 93(3). doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2022.08.025.

Pashazadeh Kan, F., Raoofi, S., Rafiei, S., Khani, S., Hosseinifard, H., Tajik, F., Raoofi, N., Ahmadi, S., Aghalou, S., Torabi, F., Dehnad, A., Rezaei, S., Hosseinipalangi, Z. and Ghashghaee, A. (2021). A systematic review of the prevalence of anxiety among the general population during the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Affective Disorders, 293(293), pp.391–398. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2021.06.073.