Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 660

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Positron emission tomographic evidence of toxic effect of MDMA (“Ecstasy”) on brain serotonin neurons in human beings

Open access
McCann, UD, Szabo, Z, Scheffel, U, Dannals, RF, Ricaurte, GA·1998·The Lancet

Abstract

BACKGROUND: (+/-)3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, "Ecstasy") is a popular recreational drug that selectively damages brain serotonin (5-HT) neurons in animals at doses that closely approach those used by humans. We investigated the status of brain 5-HT neurons in MDMA users. METHODS: We enrolled 14 previous users of MDMA who were currently abstaining from use and 15 controls who had never used MDMA. We used positron emission tomography (PET) with the radioligand carbon-11-labelled McN-5652, which selectively labels the 5-HT transporter. We analysed whether there were differences in 5-HT transporter binding between abstinent MDMA users and participants in the control group. Blood and urine samples were taken and tested to check for abstinence. FINDINGS: MDMA users showed decreased global and regional brain 5-HT transporter binding compared with controls. Decreases in 5-HT transporter binding positively correlated with the extent of previous MDMA use. INTERPRETATION: Quantitative PET studies with a ligand selective for 5-HT transporters can be used to assess the status of 5-HT neurons in the living human brain. We show direct evidence of a decrease in a structural component of brain 5-HT neurons in human MDMA users.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/s0140-6736(98)04329-3

Cites

2 of 2 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 2 references

Cited by

See all 660

Metadata

Authors
McCann, U., Szabo, Z., Scheffel, U., Dannals, R., & Ricaurte, G.
Venue
The Lancet
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
1998-10
Volume
352
Issue
9138
Pages
1433-1437
ISSN
  • 0099-5355 (ISSN-L)
  • 0140-6736
OpenAlex
W2171847604
Cited by
660
References
2
FWCI
63.90
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Positron emission tomographic evidence of toxic effect of MDMA (“Ecstasy”) on brain serotonin neurons in human beings. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/s0140-6736(98)04329-3
The paper
McCann, U., Szabo, Z., Scheffel, U., Dannals, R., & Ricaurte, G. (1998). Positron emission tomographic evidence of toxic effect of MDMA (“Ecstasy”) on brain serotonin neurons in human beings. The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(98)04329-3

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.