Successful Psilocybin Treatment of Alzheimer(frontiersin.org) |
Successful Psilocybin Treatment of Alzheimer(frontiersin.org) |
That said, some relevant context here is that:
(1) Case studies are some of the most easily fabricated journal outputs
(2) This is published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, which is listed by some as being a predatory journal [0]. The Frontiers publishers are the fine folk who published an AI generated anatomical figure of a rat that not only was obviously incorrect to anyone you'd stop on the street, it'd give them nightmares [1].
So I'm not saying this paper is bunk, but that I reserve a healthy degree of skepticism pending some clinical trials or replication in animal models.
[0] https://www.predatoryjournals.org/news/list-of-all-frontiers...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/02/scientists-aghast-at...
I'm not saying that Frontiers in Neuroscience is not predatory, but its not a proper argument for it to be predatory, to point to a random list as proof. As Beall couldn't understand being crap publisher is not predatory in it self.
On the other hand I heard a single dose does permanently increase your trait openness by a standard deviation, which is nuts. So maybe there is causation there too.
There is a growing tension between the extraordinary pop culture claims of psilocybin curing everything (now extending to Alzheimer’s due to this 1 low-quality report from Brazil) and the actual studied effects, though. A lot of the published outcomes are surprisingly low quality, like this case report or all of the studies that neglect to include a control group. Mental health studies without a control group are basically useless because even a control group that doesn’t receive a placebo (that is, people you simply monitor and interact with) will get better.
Just look at this comment section: People raising suspicions about the obvious problems in the study are being downvoted. The top voted comments are citing a Joe Rogan podcast with a guy hyping his startup. People really, really want to believe this is a magic cure and the usual guardrails of suspicion for extraordinary claims are seemingly suspended for this one topic.
The more biological effects I agreed are not conclusion that can be drawn from that.
Even more interesting, Dr. Radin discussed one of his companies is working on a new drug that uses the same brain receptors as psilocybin, that has the potential to induce similar effects (with no psychedelic side effects) with a nasal delivery system that crosses directly into the brain. The benefit of that, he says, is the effect would last for much longer, months perhaps, and patients would only have to take it a few times per year.
And it’s not even suggestive of eg making an actual medicine that could be taken long term, because Alzheimer’s physically destroys your brain. The restorative effect of psychedelics is just a bandage over not understanding why that damage is happening in the first place.
Not that I doubt the benefit of a non-psychoactive treatment. Just the adjacency of this idea to Rogan makes me immediately suspicious.
It’s a case report (n=1) that a group of 3 people from Brazil wrote up and pushed into the publishing world. The report is full of big words and tables, but barely says anything more than the abstract: It’s basically “an 80 year old Japanese women received mushrooms and was better afterward” expanded with as much medical jargon as they could apply without accidentally getting too specific. No mention of how the Alzheimer’s disease history was documented or diagnosed or even if she was a patient of one of the authors.
I’m surprised how much it’s getting people to let their guard down and accept the result. Normally when studies get posted with only 100 to 500 participants the comments everywhere are full of doubters calling out the small sample size. For some reason this n=1 story written vaguely about extraordinary claims with a complete absence of pre-treatment documentation or standardize testing/scoring hits all the right notes to convince a lot of people that mushrooms can reverse Alzheimer’s disease.
I know it’s something that a lot of people would like to be true, but this is a domain where anyone in the world can make any claims they want and find a journal who will publish it if you pay them. People write and publish papers like this all the time claiming to have treated major diseases in a single patient or group of patients with different drugs or herbs.
On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field. A field mind you, that has made a little to no progress in decades. Arguments could be made they’ve made some errors and went down the wrong path. It’s a field that could probably use some new ideas.
People in medicine or research have seen hundreds of extraordinary case reports like this. They’re everywhere on different topics and they’re not hard to get published.
They know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and it’s easy to see that this paper is completely devoid of evidence, just some extraordinary claims written in formal medical language, minus the usual process, methodology, and assessments one would expect in a paper like this.
As far as ethics go, I would absolutely sign a document that gives the right for experimentation in the event I become incapacitated to some degree.
Especially with the effects being temporary - can you imagine how awful it must be to regain lucidity outside of your control and then lose it again for the sake of an experiment like this? Awful experiment.
> pay to publish journal
> no clear Alzheimers diagnosis ("[...] were considered clinically most compatible with advanced Alzheimer’s disease")
> administration of a heroic dose of street-quality drugs vs. a controlled sample
> no university or hospital affiliation?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, hence I remain skeptical
> This case documents transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following psilocybin administration. The findings do not imply disease reversal but suggest that residual functional capacity may persist in late-stage neurodegeneration and may become transiently accessible under specific neuromodulatory conditions.
Very interesting nonetheless.
> One month after the initial session, the patient remained continent and functionally improved compared with baseline. A second supervised psilocybin session using 3 g was subsequently performed and was associated with greater verbal expressivity, improved facial mimicry, spontaneous humor, emotionally valenced autobiographical imagery, and increased agility while walking.
> The patient spontaneously stated: “It is pleasant to come here.
This is just wonderful.
This would be pretty amazing.
I responded to your other comment with this exact text, but to repeat:
This paper is not illuminating to people in the field. This is 3 unaffiliated people who paid to publish an anecdote without any supporting evidence. Paid medical journals are full of these.
Medical professionals know how to spot these claims because they’ve seen a hundred of them over the years that went nowhere. This was published not for the medical establishment, but for news media and social media and maybe to boost the author’s visibility to get funding for something they want to do.
That, or individuals will science on the ones they care for. I for one would write something like that down if I were to start developing dementia/alzheimers.
I recently lost a family member to cancer, and had to go through this conspiracy bullshit from evil pieces of shit peddling snake oil to desprate people. Whatever rabbit holes your social media algorithms have led you down aren't healthy, friend. Clear your cookies and go touch grass.
Our ability to synthesize new compounds has also exploded since then. Drug companies are looking for the next blockbuster drug. They don’t need to use psilocybin. We can now use powerful computers to come up with countless variations of drugs that activate the receptors involve and study them rapidly. There are hundreds of ligands that interact with the same receptors.