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

It isn't a monotonic decline with memories disappearing forever. It is like wave upon wave of changing capacity at different time scales. The general trend is deterioration, but there are frequent periods that can almost seem like remission.

There is a well known daily cycle referred to as "sundowning", where the sufferer tends to come unraveled later in the day. The next morning, they'll be more functional.

Later in the progression, you can see much higher frequency variations. Like periods of disorientation and confusion interspersed with periods of lucidity all within a single sitting or conversation.

In those periods of greater lucidity, recall of the past can be more accurate. General listening comprehension, speaking, and logical thought also seem more normal.

Edit to add: I sometimes wonder if the belief in terminal lucidity is one of those logical fallacies which support lots of superstitions. Are we just fixating on the final wave in this chaotic wave train, and forgetting all the other waves that happened before it? Or is it that more caretakers are engaged and observing these waves towards the end, e.g. because the patient is known to be in the terminal phase..?

I'm nobody but it makes me feels there's an economic system issue, the body gradually degrades but has the ability one last time to inject a final wave of change to try restore a proper state but the resources are too short and so the attempt cannot sustain itself.

I wonder if research is happening on this aspect.

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.

If you are to believe the Brave New World (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World) worldview of Huxley (who topically was on loads of LSD himself), you'd think the government would want to flood the public with psychedelics -- low to zero toxicity, allows people to zone out, not addictive, allows people to focus inwards rather than focus on civic mismanagement.

Any ideas on why the US government is so opposed Psychedelics? Clearly the government is for Bread and circus. In fact, the establishment left and right want desperately for us to believe everything is indeed fine regardless of the facts our eyes see (e.g. Annie Lowrey on https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/americans-depresse...)

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 patient received 5 g of orally administered psilocybin-containing mushrooms

> Approximately 19 h post-administration, spontaneous autobiographical speech emerged. Over subsequent days and weeks, functional improvements included restoration of urinary continence, improved ambulation, autonomous dressing, increased emotional responsiveness, sustained social interaction, contextual memory retrieval, preserved working memory for social context, and spontaneous conversational engagement.

This is exactly that, a treatment using psilocybin that was successful. It's not claiming to have developed a treatment protocol, the title is precise.

Questions linger about the long term use; what happens to someone who has been taking this dose, say, every two weeks for a year, or five years? Does even the second dose work as well as the first?

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

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.

This would be pretty amazing.

> Generative AI statement

> The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

> Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Which is good.

But it makes me wonder about “wherever possible”. In which case wouldn’t it be possible and why would it remain if it’s not possible?

edits: formatting

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.

They didn't even get consent from the person being drugged. That is absolutely insane.

Medical doctors have a veeeeery wide leeway when it comes to the question of what they are allowed to do to patients. If nothing goes wrong or no one complains, pretty much everything goes - ethics reviews are only a thing for large-scale studies.

The exception tends to come from drug laws - in countries like Germany, for example, psilocybin is completely banned from manufacture, possession or prescription outside of highly regulated and specially permitted academic studies, but in countries with more relaxed attitudes, as a doctor you can do individual therapies as long as you find someone willing to pay for it.

In fact, that is a common issue with cancer and rare diseases. A bunch of therapies popular in that space run either with approved medication that gets used for another purpose or in higher/lower dosages (=off label treatment) or with completely new, untested and unapproved substances - that one was an issue here in Germany with a doctor inventing his own COVID vaccine, it ended up being dragged through the courts, with a recent acquittal [1] as the court considered this as an individual therapy.

[1] https://www.lto.de/recht/nachrichten/n/lg-luebeck-corona-imp...

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.

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.

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.

Example of a shop which describes 5g as a "light dose": https://www.sirius.nl/atlantis/

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.

If you've never read a Pulitzer Prize Winner, Confederacy of Dunces would be a personally-relatable disaster (to start with; it's great).

>Psychedelics are one of my favorite classes of drug.

Your initial description of usage was probably a bit wreckless, but I do maintain that most people would probably benefit from a single (or few) psilocybin experiences (preferably an initial high-dosage with a well-trained sitter).

Microdosing is a fantastic long-term strategy, before starting more-prescribed methodologies towards happiness. Probably not useful without an initial high-dosage, first (or much cloudier/ineffective).

YMMV £¢¢£