Safety and efficacy of methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)-assisted psychotherapy in post-traumatic stress disorder: An overview of systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
The Australian and New Zealand journal of psychiatry April 1, 2025 Alene Sze Jing Yong, Suzie Bratuskins, Musa Samir Sultani et al. 16 citations
An umbrella review of 14 systematic reviews (20 primary studies, up to 353 participants) evaluating MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for post-traumatic stress disorder found that meta-analyses reported substantial benefits in symptom improvement, response, and remission compared to psychotherapy alone. However, when reviews assessed certainty of evidence, it was rated low to very low due to high risk of bias, indirectness, and imprecision. Moderate-quality evidence linked MDMA-assisted therapy to increased odds of transient adverse events, but reviews noted reliance on spontaneous rather than systematic reporting, discrepancies between published and registry data, and a lack of long-term safety information. The four high-quality reviews indicate low to very low certainty for efficacy and moderate to very low for safety.