Introduction
depression, psychiatric
DISORDER, DISEASE, DISORDERS
The classic psychedelic substance psilocybin is a promising treatment option for various psychiatric disorders, such as depression [Several studies in the 1960s and 70s suggested the effectiveness of psychedelic substances in treating Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD) [In healthy volunteers, neural effects of psilocybin have mainly been studied in resting-state fMRI experiments (for review see ref. [With regard to the mentioned knowledge gaps of psilocybin’s mode of action, translational animal models provide a valuable tool to better understand the underlying mechanistic pathways in health and disease. The alcohol deprivation effect (ADE) model in long-term alcohol drinking Wistar rats is a translational approach to model alcohol relapse behavior in AUD [Here, we applied a pharmaco-fMRI approach studying psilocybin in both healthy and alcohol-dependent rats to investigate general acute psilocybin-induced alterations of FC, aiming to replicate findings from human studies on a translational level. Then, we explored whether the intensity of the alcohol relapse in the ADE model is associated with the neural effects of psilocybin treatment, evaluating how a history of alcohol exposure and relapse might interfere with psychedelic-induced neural changes (Fig. 