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Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

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Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#31

Post by Aurornis »

rerx wrote: post #30
Aurornis wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psilocybin is harder to get research approvals for than many things, but it’s not “completely banned”. There are studies every year being completed with psilocybin, many of which get posted here on HN. 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…

In defense of the comment you replied to: Research into treatments with Psilocybin or LSD was in quite a hiatus for decades after the substances were banned in the 1960s or 70s.

I understand that, but a lot has changed since then and psilocybin is not the only substance that has been studied which interacts with those receptors.

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.

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#32

Post by andai »

trumpdong wrote: post #16

Psilocybin is one of those things we don't even know the full effects of because the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.

Was that causation though? I have to imagine the kind of people who are open to psychedelics also generally oppose war.

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.

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#33

Post by tim-star »

Aurornis wrote: post #31
rerx wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In defense of the comment you replied to: Research into treatments with Psilocybin or LSD was in quite a hiatus for decades after the substances were banned in the 1960s or 70s.

I understand that, but a lot has changed since then and psilocybin is not the only substance that has been studied which interacts with those receptors. 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 recept…

certainly you should understand the context of the comment then- the commenter was saying we had a 40 year moratorium on research because of the governments decisions at the time. There is a lot of research again now, but research takes time.

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#34

Post by bitmasher9 »

sva_ wrote: post #6

> n=1 > 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

I think it’s funny to describe a drug as “street-quality” while using a slang term “heroic dose” in the same sentence.

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#35

Post by bitmasher9 »

dwroberts wrote: post #20
UnfitFootprint wrote: post #3

Good riddance - this kind of thing needs to be experimented with more. But 5 grams! This reads like witch doctor science; I’m surprised it passed ethics

Yeah this story was on HN before a few weeks ago and I raised similar - it’s nuts to give that to someone who probably doesn’t have the mental state to be able to comprehend what is going on. Don’t understand how it is possibly ethical to do. 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 experimen…

What an interesting take. I was imagining how precious one last conversation with a loved one would be.

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#36

Post by maxbond »

andai wrote: post #32
trumpdong wrote: post #16

Psilocybin is one of those things we don't even know the full effects of because the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.

Was that causation though? I have to imagine the kind of people who are open to psychedelics also generally oppose war. 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.

It definitely wasn't causation, the causation flows the other way (criminalizing a proxy for a political belief as an end run around the first amendment).

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#37

Post by drakythe »

40four wrote: post #9

This exact case study came up on a recent Rogan episode with Dean Radin, PhD. While the result is very interesting and perhaps illuminating about the unexpected biological mechanisms, apparently the effects were very short lived. 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 (w…

I am immediately skeptical of anyone who goes on Rogan's show. Looking him up the guy has a PhD in education psychology, and his masters was in electrical engineering. I'm curious how much expertise he truly has on the subject and whether this was just spin for his company's work vs the natural option of psilocybin.

Not that I doubt the benefit of a non-psychoactive treatment. Just the adjacency of this idea to Rogan makes me immediately suspicious.

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#38

Post by dwroberts »

40four wrote: post #9

This exact case study came up on a recent Rogan episode with Dean Radin, PhD. While the result is very interesting and perhaps illuminating about the unexpected biological mechanisms, apparently the effects were very short lived. 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 (w…

The problem with this study though is that it doesn’t really illuminate anything. Psychedelics restoring the default mode network in the brain is already somewhat understood (*that it happens, not the mechanism of how), so it’s not that strange a temporary reversion of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s would happen.

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.

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#39

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

Aurornis wrote: post #26
trumpdong wrote: post #16

Psilocybin is one of those things we don't even know the full effects of because the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.

Psilocybin is harder to get research approvals for than many things, but it’s not “completely banned”. There are studies every year being completed with psilocybin, many of which get posted here on HN. 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…

When you take it, you understand, that if taken with the right approach it can lead to profound insights in changing your life and the effects described: helping with depression, addiction and accepting death are not far fetched at all. Yet it can also, if not guided or done on someone with anxiety have the opposite effect.

The more biological effects I agreed are not conclusion that can be drawn from that.

Re: Improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin

#40

Post by jszymborski »

So, I'm not making any accusations or decelerations of "bad science", I've only read the abstract and this isn't my field.

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...

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