schmutzen said:

Highly skeptical....Anything with Stamets gives me BS vibes.

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Primal Glitch said:

Nineteen hours after the dose, she began to speak. Not in fragments, but in autobiographical sentences, recalling things about her own life that nobody around her had heard her articulate in years.

Over the following days and weeks, the changes broadened. She regained urinary continence. She walked with less support. She dressed herself. She made eye contact, responded emotionally to the people around her, remembered who had visited and what had been said, and held conversations rather than tolerating them.

The authors are careful about what this is and isn't. They are not claiming that psilocybin reversed her Alzheimer's disease. The improvements were transient, and the underlying neurodegeneration has not gone anywhere. Functional capacities thought to have been lost in late-stage dementia may not be entirely lost, but inaccessible, and a strong enough neuromodulatory event can briefly let them through.

Advanced Alzheimer's is typically understood to treat the silence and dependency of the late stage as the direct readout of dead tissue. If a single dose can restore speech and continence for weeks, some of what looks like irreversible decline may be a network problem rather than a tissue problem, at least in some patients.

Psilocybin is already known to shake loose entrenched patterns of brain activity in depression and to trigger plasticity-related mechanisms in animal models. Whether any of that can be harnessed safely in an 80-year-old with advanced dementia is a separate question, and the acute autonomic effects in this case are a serious flag. But one woman, after a decade of decline, spoke about her own life again. That is a fact worth sitting with.

>> link to study <<

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Quote:

After being given “five grams of orally administered psilocybin-containing mushrooms” — well over twice a typical recreational dose — 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.”

The report’s authors insist that those who conducted the medical intervention ensured her safety.

“Given the severity of her cognitive impairment, the patient was not considered capable of providing fully informed consent on her own,” Author and psychiatrist Marcos Lago told Futurism in an email. “Consent for the intervention was therefore provided by her legally authorized representative, who was also closely involved in her care and familiar with her medical condition.”

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 possible 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.”

Lago told Futurism 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 Lago’s affiliation as 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.

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