Scientists continue to investigate the potential clinical use of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in psychedelic mushrooms, for everything from a potential anti-aging treatment to therapy for depression and anxiety.
Some have even suggested it could even be an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, a devastating neurodegenerative condition that affects more than seven million Americans.
Case in point, a recent case report — published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience Neuropharmacology by a small team of researchers in Brazil —describes an experiment involving a woman, in her 80s and who had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for ten years, being given a staggeringly high dose of psilocybin.
After being given “five grams of orally administered psilocybin-containing mushrooms” — well over twice a typical recreational dose and orders of magnitude more than is conventionally prescribed in clinical settings — the team says that the woman experienced what could crudely be described as a reawakening.
In a matter of “days and weeks” — the report remains vague on the exact timeline — the patient went from “marked hypofunction and predominantly monosyllabic speech” to restored “urinary continence,” improved mobility, “increased emotional responsiveness” and “sustained social interaction.” Even her “contextual memory retrieval” allegedly improved.
The octogenarian must’ve gone through a lot, spending hours sweating profusely in a “deep sleep-like state” following the administering of the drug. The woman was even given a second, three-gram dose after a month due to “persistence of clinically meaningful improvements.” (Futurism has reached out to the authors about the woman’s ability to consent to the eyebrow-raising treatment given her state.)
To be perfectly clear, the whole thing is pretty dodgy, despite getting considerable breathless media coverage in the New York Post and the Dallas Express, which called the report a “breakthrough.” Beyond the hard-to-miss absence of scientific rigor and consent issues, the “report does not show that psychedelics reverse Alzheimer’s disease,” as University of Sheffield neuroscience PhD candidate Rahul Sidhu wrote in an essay for The Conversation,
The report wasn’t a controlled clinical trial, for starters, and its single subject’s diagnosis wasn’t “confirmed using biomarkers.” There was also no control group, no standardized testing of memory and thinking before the woman was given the shrooms, and observations were “largely based on reports from caregivers and family members,” Sidhu cautioned.
In short, the case report appears to be little more than a wild story of an elderly woman being given an enormous dose of drugs. In the words of the case report itself, it was an intervention that was “exploratory and observational in nature.”
Author and University of Sao Paulo neuroscientist Marcos Lago told Futurism in an email that he thought it was “important to frame the case carefully.”
“This was a single case report in a patient with advanced Alzheimer’s disease, and the observed improvements were transient,” he wrote. “The paper does not claim disease reversal, does not establish psilocybin as a treatment for dementia, and should not be interpreted as a protocol or recommendation for unsupervised use.”
“In my view, the scientific relevance of the case is that it raises a hypothesis worth investigating,” Lago wrote. “Whether psilocybin, under appropriate clinical, ethical, and regulatory conditions, may temporarily modulate communication, emotional responsiveness, social engagement, continence, and functional behavior in some patients with severe neurodegenerative impairment.”
Beyond the informal and inconclusive nature of the report, there are more reasons to be skeptical. The case report lists the medical department of the so-called “Associação Cruz de Ankh” in Sao Paulo, which appears to be a religious and philosophical organization.
An Instagram account for the group has been gushing about media coverage of the latest case report. The account’s previous activity doesn’t exactly inspire confidence: one previous post discusses Plato’s Cave as a “metaphor for awakening human consciousness amid the illusions of everyday life,” while another details how participants of a “group meeting” reported “introspective experiences with psilocybin use,” from “ancestral visions,” to “overcoming barriers of ego.”
That’s not to say that there isn’t a grain of something interesting in the case study. Scientists have previously found that “new connections can form and networks can change in response to experience,” as Sidhu points out in The Conversation. Previous studies have also found that psilocybin can temporarily reshuffle how these networks communicate with one another.
The drug has also been found to help with “nerve-cell growth, inflammation and brain-network activity,” but “whether these effects occur in people with Alzheimer’s disease remains unknown,” Sidhu wrote.
Add it all up, and the case study is both intriguing and a bit bizarre. As always, we’ll be watching for further investigation.
More on psilocybin: Evidence Grows That Tripping on Shrooms Might Increase Your Lifespan