Psilocybin Tied to Lower Inflammation in Parkinson's Trial

 Is your competent? doctor ready with this to try to prevent Parkinsons after your stroke? Sorry, your doctor doesn't even know of your Parkinson's risk! 

Parkinson’s Disease May Have Link to Stroke March 2017 

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Isn't your doctor already prescribing psilocybin for stroke recovery? Oh NO, you DON'T have a functioning stroke doctor, do you? 

psilocybin (59 posts to May 2014) 

Psilocybin Tied to Lower Inflammation in Parkinson's Trial

Key Takeaways

• Psilocybin therapy was associated with reduced inflammation in a small trial of Parkinson's patients with mood dysfunction.
• An inflammatory index remained lower through 30 days, but mitochondrial stress marker reductions were transient.
• Findings require confirmation in larger randomized controlled trials.

Markers of systemic inflammation and mitochondrial stress were reduced after psilocybin therapy in Parkinson's disease patients with mood dysfunction, a small nonrandomized trial showed.

Relative to baseline, an inflammatory index was significantly lower at all follow-up time points after psilocybin was administered, reported Ellen Bradley, MD, of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), and co-authors.

The standard mean difference (SMD) was -0.72 (adjusted P=0.003) 1 day after 10 mg of psilocybin, Bradley and colleagues wrote in a JAMA Psychiatry research letter.

One day after 25 mg of psilocybin, the SMD was -0.60 (adjusted P=0.02), and 30 days after 25 mg, the SMD was -0.62 (adjusted P=.047).

The results support the researchers' parent trial, which showed an association between psilocybin therapy and reduced depression, anxiety, and motor symptoms in Parkinson's patients.

"To our knowledge, this is the first report of changes in these types of markers after psychedelic treatment in people with a neurodegenerative disease," Bradley told MedPage Today. "That gives us and other researchers super-interesting biological questions to pursue: What could be producing these changes, are they consistent in larger groups of people, and do they have anything to do with clinical benefits people with Parkinson's might experience with psilocybin?"

This research comes as part of a series of studies examining the biological effects of psychedelics as potential therapeutics for non-psychiatric conditions, said Albert Garcia-Romeu, PhD, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who wasn't involved with the study. It also comes on the heels of work showing that psilocybin appeared to block nerve damage related to chemotherapy in mice, he pointed out.

Much of the work looking at psilocybin or LSD has focused squarely on mental health conditions like depression, anxiety, or addiction, Garcia-Romeu noted. "However, this study is in patients with a neurological condition -- Parkinson's disease -- and shows evidence that psilocybin may have impacted biological markers of inflammation and mitochondrial stress," he told MedPage Today.

"These new data suggest biological effects of psychedelics could be driving potential benefits in patients and pave the way for more work to better understand how psilocybin might be a useful therapeutic both in psychiatric and non-psychiatric conditions," he added.

In their open-label trial, Bradley and colleagues studied 12 people with mild-to-moderate Parkinson's disease ages 40 to 75. Participants received 10-mg and 25-mg doses of oral synthetic psilocybin approximately 2 weeks apart.

The researchers collected plasma samples from nine participants at four time points: baseline, 1 day after each psilocybin administration, and 30 days after the 25-mg dose.

The primary outcome to assess systemic inflammation was a proinflammatory index calculated as the mean z score of interleukin (IL)-6, IL-8, tumor necrosis factor alpha, interferon gamma, and high-sensitivity C-reactive protein concentrations. Mitochondrial stress was evaluated with growth differentiation factor 15 (GDF-15) and fibroblast growth factor 21 (FGF-21) measurements.

Components of the index, including IL-6, were significantly lower 1 day after the 10-mg dose but at no other time points. IL-10 was significantly higher 1 day after the 10-mg dose but not at other times.

GDF-15 was significantly lower relative to baseline 1 day after each psilocybin administration, but not from baseline 30 days after the 25-mg dose. FGF-21 was higher 1 day after each psilocybin administration, but this finding was not significant.

This was a small study of psilocybin therapy and results must be interpreted cautiously, noted co-author Aoife O'Donovan, PhD, also of UCSF. "However, the results are highly promising and suggest that more research in this area is warranted," she told MedPage Today. "We are already following this study up with more in-depth analyses of the effects of psilocybin therapy on inflammation and mitochondrial stress in a randomized controlled trial in patients with Parkinson's disease."

Work from Garcia-Romeu's lab also is studying psilocybin in a trial of people with mild cognitive impairment or early-stage Alzheimer's disease and depression. "To date, we've treated 18 individuals in that study, and enrolled 19 of a targeted 20 patients," he said. "We plan to complete the trial and publish our findings next year."

Psilocybin may make the brain more organized than scientists expected

Isn't your doctor already the competent one already prescribing psilocybin for stroke recovery? Oh NO, you DON'T have a functioning stroke doctor, do you? 

psilocybin (58 posts to May 2014) 

 Psilocybin may make the brain more organized than scientists expected

Researchers tracked psychedelic-naive adults across four very different brain-scanning environments to reveal how setting, brain dynamics and subjective experience interact during a psilocybin session.

Study: Psychedelics align brain activity with context. Image Credit: Smit / Shutterstock

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A recent study published in the journal Nature investigated how psilocybin alters brain connectivity and organization across different environmental contexts.

Neural and Contextual Mechanisms of Psychedelic Action

Psychedelics are a diverse class of psychoactive substances that profoundly alter perception, mood, and cognition. They can induce striking changes in consciousness and sensory experience, including vivid visual or auditory hallucinations, a distorted sense of time, and deeply introspective or spiritual states. Compounds such as psilocybin and mescaline have a long history of use in both ceremonial and therapeutic settings. Recent research highlights their potential for lasting therapeutic effects, including reductions in depression, anxiety, and addiction, as well as enhanced social connectedness and well-being. At the neural level, psychedelics disrupt the brain’s integration of sensory input with internal models of reality. Preclinical studies indicate that psilocybin can promote structural and functional plasticity, while human imaging studies show altered communication between large-scale brain networks, leading to intensified immersion and altered self-perception. These effects are linked to more entropic, desynchronized brain dynamics, particularly within the default mode network (DMN), which is a key hub for integrating information across the brain. Psilocybin can relax connectivity patterns that normally constrain brain networks, allowing novel interactions between sensory and associative regions that may be relevant to its therapeutic effects. However, the precise mechanisms linking these neural changes to meaningful subjective experiences remain unclear.

Psychedelic outcomes are highly context-dependent, shaped by mindset and environment. However, research in this field is limited by small sample sizes, narrow imaging approaches, and studies conducted in single, artificial contexts, all of which limit generalizability. Additionally, structured tasks during brain scans may fail to capture the richness of natural psychedelic experiences. Addressing these limitations by employing larger samples, multimodal imaging, and more ecologically valid context manipulations remains a central challenge for the field.

Researchers Examined How Psychedelics Affect Brain Activity and Subjective Experience

In the open-label PsiConnect study, researchers conducted two imaging sessions: one at baseline and one after a fixed 19 mg dose of psilocybin. Each session included magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) scans across four conditions: resting state, guided meditation, music listening, and movie watching. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) began roughly 80 minutes after dosing, following a fixed sequence to ensure safety for participants new to psychedelics. EEG sessions started after setup, beginning with the movie condition. All four conditions: resting state (eyes closed), guided meditation (audio prompts), music listening (curated playlist), and movie watching (silent clouds) were repeated at both time points.

Sixty-five participants were recruited (aged 18–55; 30 female, 35 male), stratified by age and self-reported gender, and then assigned to either an 8-week mindfulness-based intervention or a control group using a non-randomized, balanced procedure without blinding. No significant group differences emerged in the connectivity or acute subjective-effect measures examined, so data were pooled for analysis. Sample size was limited by recruitment and imaging capacity.

The fixed 19 mg dose was selected to be tolerable during imaging while producing substantial subjective effects. Behavioral and subjective measures were collected at multiple time points, with follow-up assessments extending to one year post-psilocybin.

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Sixty-five healthy adults with no prior psychedelic experience producing subjective effects underwent extensive screening; three reported nominal or remote serotonergic psychedelic exposures with minimal or no recalled effects. Psilocybin administration was generally well tolerated, although three participants reported transient headaches during the night. Separately, three participants received a brief telephone follow-up from a clinical psychologist and required no further support.

Context-Driven Neural Patterns Under Psilocybin

Psilocybin reorganized brain connectivity, reducing global functional connectivity (GFC) in sensory regions and increasing it in associative regions during eyes-closed conditions. Under eyes-open conditions, GFC increased in both sensory and associative areas. These robust effects are consistent with prior research, despite individual variability.

Spatial patterns of brain signal variability shifted with context. Eyes-open movie viewing increased variability in several cortical regions, while eyes-closed conditions, especially with music, decreased variability in early visual areas. Increases were partially lateralized to the right hemisphere during eyes-closed conditions, and occipital decreases mirrored GFC patterns, a redistribution consistent with increased brain-signal entropy under psilocybin.

GFC values in the eyes-open and eyes-closed states converged under psilocybin, particularly within the visual network, with the gap shrinking by 85%. Functional modularity decreased across all conditions, largely due to reduced within-network connectivity, an effect that previous clinical studies have associated with longer-term symptom improvement. Machine learning produced low-dimensional neural representations that reliably differentiated conditions and mapped brain patterns to subjective experience.

Greater subjective-effect intensity was associated with increasingly distinct, context-specific neural organization. Stronger subjective effects produced more distinct, condition-specific neural patterns, with brain organization scaling to effect intensity.

Context-dependent neural organization was robust across dimensionality reduction methods. Classification accuracy for brain patterns peaked in those with strong self- or boundary-dissolving effects and was associated with positive next-day mindset changes. This alignment was not captured by average network segregation measures.

In a network perturbation analysis, context alignment depended most strongly on altered dynamics in both the default mode network (DMN) and the visual network. TAVRNN analysis confirmed that psilocybin produced dynamic, low-dimensional patterns reflecting evolving brain connectivity.

TAVRNN, a machine-learning model that tracks changes in brain connectivity over time, showed more cohesive organization both within individual networks and across the brain. These patterns scaled with subjective-effect intensity and were broadly preserved across contexts.

Psychedelic-naive participants reported profoundly meaningful effects, often ranking psilocybin as a top life event. Self- and boundary-dissolving experiences were common, with group-level increases in death acceptance, personal meaning, and nature relatedness measured after one month.

Anterior hippocampus–DMN effective connectivity shifted most during movie viewing, indicating that external context strongly reorganizes network interactions under psilocybin. Brief mindfulness training produced no detectable group-level differences in the acute subjective effects or connectivity measures examined, but music strongly enhanced emotional engagement and was associated with the greatest global brain organization in the TAVRNN analysis.

EEG results showed that psilocybin’s effects on brain power and complexity depend on sensory context, altering neural oscillations and signal diversity. Findings support context alignment as a cross-modal brain property.

Machine learning linked self- and boundary-dissolution to more integrated, context-aligned brain dynamics, while the authors described the corresponding subjective state as 'embeddedness': the experience of being continuous with, rather than separate from, the environment. The authors proposed embeddedness as a construct that links acute experience to subsequent psychological change, thereby supporting the temporary dissolution of internal–external boundaries.

Across measures and contexts, psilocybin reorganizes brain connectivity, redistributing sensory and associative integration in a context-dependent manner and blurring the boundary between internal and external processing. These effects are strongest with positive experiences, and a measurable neural signature is identified, associated with acute subjective experience and subsequent psychological change.

Conclusions

Psilocybin induces a dynamic reorganization of brain connectivity, characterized by context-dependent redistribution of integration across associative and sensory networks, effectively blurring the distinction between internal and external processing. This flexible neural state is most pronounced during positive, self-dissolving experiences and is reflected in both subjective reports and context-driven brain activity patterns identified by machine learning.

These findings identify a measurable neural signature linking context-sensitive brain organization with acute subjective experience and next-day mindset change, and suggest that context and subjective experience may help shape the therapeutic potential of psilocybin, although therapeutic efficacy was not tested in this healthy cohort.

Journal reference:

• Stoliker, D., et al. (2026). Psychedelics align brain activity with context. Nature. 1-12. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10910-z, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10910-z

Psilocybin Therapy Drives 75% PTSD Remission

 Will your competent? doctor go through all the headaches of approvals for your PTSD or do the correct option? EXACT 100% RECOVERY PROTOCOLS!

Since there is a 23% chance of stroke survivors getting PTSD what is your doctor's prevention plan?

Of course your competent? doctor ignored all the previous positive research on psilocybin for stroke! Over a decade of incompetence!

psilocybin (57 posts to May 2014) 

The latest here:

Psilocybin Therapy Drives 75% PTSD Remission

Summary: The first U.S. clinical trial evaluating psilocybin-assisted therapy in military veterans with treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has demonstrated significant safety and clinical efficacy.

The 11-week pilot trial combined 14 to 16 hours of preparation and integration psychotherapy with two synthetic psilocybin dosing sessions (15 mg and 25 mg). One month post-treatment, 75% of participants (9 of 12) achieved full PTSD remission, with an average clinician-rated symptom score reduction of 27.5 points.

The protocol produced no serious adverse events, no increase in suicidal ideation, and demonstrated that non-drug psychotherapy acts as an essential substrate that psilocybin catalyzes to achieve durable therapeutic breakthroughs.

Key Facts

• High Remission Efficacy: 75% of trial participants (9 out of 12 veterans with severe treatment-resistant PTSD) no longer met diagnostic criteria for PTSD one month after treatment completion.
• Symptom Reduction Magnitude: Clinician-administered assessment scales revealed a mean decrease of 27.5 points in overall PTSD symptom severity from baseline to one month post-treatment.
• Favorable Safety Profile: No serious adverse events or significant increases in suicidal ideation were observed; the most common transient side effect was mild post-dosing headache.
• Structured Dosing & Therapy Protocol: The 11-week trial framework integrated 8 hours of preparatory psychotherapy, two synthetic psilocybin administration sessions (15 mg followed by 25 mg), and 6 to 8 hours of post-dosing integration therapy.
• Synergistic Catalyst Mechanism: Quantitative tracking revealed measurable symptom reductions during prep therapy alone, with massive acceleration following psilocybin administration, supporting the model that psilocybin acts as a pharmacological catalyst for deep psychotherapeutic processing.

Source: Ohio State University

The first U.S. clinical trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy in veterans with PTSD who got no relief from conventional treatments has established that the protocol is safe, causing no serious adverse events or increases in suicidal thinking or behavior.

But the preliminary clinical results exceeded researchers’ expectations: In the pilot trial with 12 veterans, 75% of participants were in remission one month after the study’s end. Their symptoms no longer met the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“For a population with severe treatment-resistant PTSD, these results are striking,” said Stacey Armstrong, first author of the new study, published today (July 30, 2026) in Communications Medicine.

“While treatments do work for some veterans with PTSD, they’re falling short for many, leaving veterans to continue to search for solutions, which can lead to treatment dropout, long-term disability and elevated suicide risk,” said Armstrong, senior researcher and associate director of the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE) in The Ohio State University College of Social Work.

“It’s this unmet need that inspires us.”

The 11-week trial period combined eight hours of psychotherapy followed by two doses, 15 milligrams and 25 milligrams, of synthetic psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Six to eight more hours of integrative therapy followed the drug treatment.

From baseline to one month after treatment was finished, there was an overall average drop of 27.5 points in clinician-rated PTSD symptoms among the group. Nine participants had a clinical response to treatment and were in remission. No severe adverse events occurred, with the most common side effect being a mild headache after taking psilocybin. Suicidal ideation scores did not significantly change from baseline to one month post-treatment.

Future papers from this study will assess the treatment’s effectiveness up to six months after the trial, as well as biological changes and effects on other PTSD-related problems like sleep disorders and substance use, said Alan Davis, senior author of the study, director of the CPDRE and associate professor of social work at Ohio State.

Anecdotal observations, and previous research showing that depression remission endured for five years after an earlier psilocybin trial that Davis co-led, suggest the combined therapies could have staying power for many people whose symptoms are not eased by traditional therapies.

“It’s been an incredible honor to work with veterans in this study, many of whom have been suffering with PTSD for decades or longer,” said Davis, who also holds faculty appointments in psychology and internal medicine at Ohio State.

“Some experiences we’ve seen in actual treatment sessions are extremely profound and meaningful. The ability for them to go back and to revisit really difficult events that happened to them and to find a new way of understanding them and a new way of moving forward in their life has really been exciting.”

One participant’s experience

To be eligible for the trial, veterans had to have severe PTSD that was considered treatment-resistant. The need for help in this population became quite evident as participant recruitment began: Over 3,600 applicants reached out to partake in online prescreening and 668 were assessed for eligibility. Though the initial goal was 15 participants, the final number was 12 – nine men and three women.

Zachariah Collett, a U.S. Army veteran from Washington Court House, Ohio, considers himself one of the lucky ones who was selected to participate.

Collett joined the Army in 2002 as an enlisted soldier and later became a military police corps paratrooper, serving a 28-month combat tour in Iraq. By age 25 he was medically retired. Among the diagnoses and service-connected disabilities that led to retirement was post-traumatic stress disorder.  

His symptoms included nightmares, a short temper, feeling constantly on guard and being angry virtually all the time – leading to behavior that had a negative effect on his family.

“I was just absolutely tortured by the internal struggle, the internal dialogue, the noise inside my head and the inability even to just be still,” Collett said. Years of trying counseling and medications didn’t help.

It was an intensive 41-day self-discovery experience combining a healthful diet with a series of integrative therapies that first put Collett on the path to healing. When he later learned about the psilocybin trial, he saw it as the perfect opportunity – and medicine – to take a “deeper dive.”

Now three years out from the treatment, he said the psilocybin-assisted therapy had a profound effect on him, his family and his marriage.

“For the first six months to a year, I felt like I had this fantastic set of training wheels while I’m relearning the way to act in situations,” he said. “That’s the great thing about this medicine. It’s gentle and it allowed me the space to rediscover, or discover, things I didn’t know I was capable of doing.

“It allowed me the opportunity to create peace, and stillness, and acceptance, and forgiveness and grace – all those things opposite of resentment and anger and hatred. It’s rather beautiful.”

Where the magic happens

A rigorous psychotherapy schedule is a key part of the process, with evidence from the trial suggesting that PTSD symptoms were lowered even before the drug was administered.

“There is this big question in the psychedelic therapy field right now about how much of this is a drug effect, how much of this is a therapy effect, and how much is a combination of the two,” Davis said.

This study, the first to try to answer the question, found a drop in PTSD symptoms from baseline to the end of preparation therapy, with a much larger reduction after the psilocybin doses.

“This treatment is more than just a drug,” Davis said. “The drug itself is a catalyst for the deep work that opens a window for people to perhaps access things they wouldn’t be able to access emotionally otherwise, and what that does is catalyze the therapeutic process after.

“That’s where the magic actually happens. It happens in the therapy, and in the changes that people start to make in their lives after the treatment’s concluded.”

The research team acknowledges that pilot studies with no control group tend to produce larger effect sizes than standard clinical trials. They hope to secure funding to follow up with a larger randomized, controlled clinical trial.

“Recognizing the tools that we have don’t work so well and recognizing the significant burden of PTSD in the United States carried by our servicemen and women and veterans, this seemed like the right direction to go,” Armstrong said. “Too many veterans right now are suffering despite the treatments that we have, and that’s why we feel that this research is important.”

Davis, who has been studying psychedelics as a component of mental health treatment for the past 16 years, said, “This is a very exciting time for psychedelic-assisted therapy research. These treatments are generally safe, well tolerated and showing a strong signal of efficacy.”

Funding: This research was supported by Ohio State’s College of Social Work, The Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education, the Clinical Research Center/Center for Clinical Research Management of The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State’s College of Medicine.

Additional co-authors were Adam Levin, Nathan Sepeda, Hillary Shaub, Taweh Hunter, Angela Douglas and Rafaelle Lancelotta, all of Ohio State.

Key Questions Answered:

Q: How severe was the PTSD among veterans enrolled in this pilot trial?

A: Enrolled veterans suffered from severe, service-connected PTSD that was explicitly categorized as treatment-resistant, meaning years of conventional counseling and psychiatric medications had failed to provide meaningful clinical relief.

Q: What is the relative contribution of the drug versus the therapy in psilocybin-assisted treatment?

A: Trial data showed that while preparatory psychotherapy produced measurable initial symptom reductions, psilocybin administration caused a dramatically larger reduction. The drug serves as a biological catalyst that temporarily opens an emotional window, enabling veterans to process traumatic memories during subsequent integration therapy.

Q: What are the next research steps planned for this treatment protocol?

A: The research team is conducting longitudinal follow-ups to evaluate symptom durability up to six months post-trial, alongside biomarker analyses assessing sleep and substance use. Funding is also being pursued for a larger randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial.

Editorial Notes:

• This article was edited by a Neuroscience News editor.
• Journal paper reviewed in full.
• Additional context added by our staff.

About this PTSD and psychopharmacology research news

Author: Emily Caldwell
Source: Ohio State University
Contact: Emily Caldwell – Ohio State University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: Open access.
“Safety, Feasibility, and Preliminary Clinical Outcomes of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy for Veterans with Treatment-Resistant PTSD: A phase 2 non-randomized clinical trial” by Stacey Armstrong, Adam Levin, Nathan Sepeda, Hillary Shaub, Taweh Hunter, Angela Douglas, Rafaelle Lancelotta, Alan Davis. Communications Medicine
DOI:10.1038/s43856-026-01767-4

Psilocybin reduces fear memory and restores neuroplasticity in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex

 

Of course your competent? doctor ignored all the previous positive research on psilocybin for stroke! Over a decade of incompetence!

psilocybin (56 posts to May 2014)

Since there is a 23% chance of stroke survivors getting PTSD what is your doctor's treatment plan?

Harnessing Psilocybin to Treat PTSD

Treating PTSD With Ecstasy? You Might Have Some Questions. May 2018

Ecstasy Was Just Labelled a 'Breakthrough Therapy' For PTSD by The FDA August 2017

But this negative action:

FDA Rejects MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD

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Psilocybin reduces fear memory and restores neuroplasticity in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex

Yingjie Du, Xiangting Zhao, […], and Liming Zhang https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9071-8985 zhanglm0308@163.com+3View all authors and affiliations

Abstract

Background:

 Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depressive disorder are often comorbid in humans. Psilocybin reportedly has beneficial therapeutic effects on depression, possibly by promoting neuroplasticity. PTSD is associated with the dysregulation of neuroplasticity in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). We hypothesized that psilocybin might reduce fear memory by promoting neuroplasticity in the hippocampus and mPFC.

 We investigated the effects of psilocybin on fear memory and explored its underlying mechanisms. We generated a mouse model of PTSD via auditory-cued fear conditioning and treated the mice with either vehicle or psilocybin (2.5 mg/kg, intraperitoneal) on day 0. Fear memory was assessed by the percentage of freezing time in response to conditioned stimuli. Fear memory tests were conducted on days 1, 6, and 7, after which the mice were sacrificed. To investigate the role of neuroplasticity in mediating the effects of psilocybin on fear memory, we assessed structural neuroplasticity and neuroplasticity-associated marker protein levels in the hippocampus and mPFC 7 days after a single dose of psilocybin.

Results:

Psilocybin reduced the cue-induced fear response on days 1, 6, and 7. Psilocybin ameliorated the fear conditioning-induced decreases in neuroplasticity in the hippocampus and mPFC. Through Golgi-Cox staining, Western blotting, and immunofluorescence staining, we found that psilocybin increased dendritic branches and spine density, upregulated GluR1 and synapsin-1, enhanced brain-derived neurotrophic factor and mammalian target of rapamycin signaling, and promoted neurogenesis.

Conclusions:

A single dose of psilocybin reduces both the rapid and sustained fear memory in mice, at least in part by restoring neuroplasticity in the hippocampus and mPFC. These findings indicate that psilocybin has significant potential for use in the treatment of PTSD and other mental disorders characterized by fear memory.

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Transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin-containing mushroom administration: a case report

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psilocybin (54 posts to May 2014)

Transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following high-dose psilocybin-containing mushroom administration: a case report

Single dose of magic mushroom psychedelic can cause anatomical brain changes, study finds

 Have your competent? doctor and hospital get research going on possible benefits to stroke recovery! Of course, they being up-to-date on all things stroke already have stuff in the works for over a decade, right? 

Oh NO, NOTHING WAS DONE! WHY?

Laziness? Incompetence? Or just don't care? NO leadership? NO strategy? Not my job? Not my Problem!

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Single dose of magic mushroom psychedelic can cause anatomical brain changes, study finds

Single dose of magic mushroom psychedelic can cause anatomical brain changes, study finds

 Your competent? doctor already has prescribed various unorthodox drugs, right?

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Psychedelics (25 posts to August 2018) 

The latest here:

Single dose of magic mushroom psychedelic can cause anatomical brain changes, study finds

Participants took 25mg of psilocybin, reporting deeper psychological insight and better wellbeing a month later

A single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can induce anatomical changes in the brain, according to research among people who took the psychedelic compound for the first time.

Scientists spotted apparent changes in the brain’s structure which were still apparent a month after healthy volunteers took the drug. If confirmed, they may help explain the therapeutic effects that psychedelics can have on anxiety, depression and addiction, researchers said.

Evidence for the changes came from specialised scans that measured the diffusion of water along nerve bundles in the brain. They suggested that some nerve tracts had become denser and more robust after the drug was taken. While the findings are preliminary, the scientists said the opposite was seen in ageing and dementia.

Experts warn of mental health risks after rise in magic mushroom use

Read more

“It’s remarkable to see potential anatomical brain changes one month after a single dose of any drug,” said Prof Robin Carhart-Harris, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and senior author on the study. “We don’t yet know what these changes mean, but we do note that overall, people showed positive psychological changes in this study, including improved wellbeing and mental flexibility.”

Scientists have long sought to understand how psychedelics affect the brain and the work has gained fresh impetus in the wake of trials and studies that suggest the compounds could be used to treat a range of mental health disorders. The drugs are thought to help by boosting flexible thinking and allowing people to escape destructive cognitive ruts.In the latest study, Carhart-Harris and colleagues at Imperial College London explored the “entropic brain effect”, in which neural activity becomes more varied on psychedelics; the impact of the drug on people’s wellbeing alongside any functional or anatomical changes in the brain.

To start, 28 healthy volunteers who had never taken a psychedelic were given 1mg of psilocybin, a small enough dose to be considered a placebo. The scientists then used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure their brain activity via electrodes on the scalp.

The volunteers completed a raft of tests over the next few weeks to measure their wellbeing, depth of psychological insight and the flexibility of their thinking. Meanwhile, functional MRI scans and a technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) monitored their brains.

A month after the placebo, participants took a single 25mg dose of psilocybin, enough to elicit a powerful psychedelic experience. During the trip and for weeks after, the scientists ran the same tests and brain monitoring to see what happened.

Within an hour of taking the drug, EEG revealed a surge in brain entropy, suggesting the brain was processing a greater diversity of information. A month later, DTI scans revealed a drop in diffusion along nerve tracts running from the front to the middle of the brain. That could be caused by pruning of some nerve fibres, or the growth of nerves that are not yet covered with insulating sheaths, though more work is needed to confirm the finding.

Writing in Nature Communications, the researchers describe another key finding. Those who had the largest spike in brain entropy after psilocybin were most likely to report deeper psychological insight and better wellbeing a month later, underlining the link between flexible thinking and improved mental health. “It suggests a psychobiological therapeutic action for psilocybin,” said Carhart-Harris.

Prof Alex Kwan, a neuroscientist at Cornell University in New York, said studies in mice had shown that psychedelics can rewire connections between nerves, a form of “plasticity” that could underlie their therapeutic effects. The big question is whether the same occurs in humans. “This study comes closer than most to addressing that question, by giving evidence of lasting changes in brain structure after psychedelic use,” he said. But while the results were “exciting”, the study involved a small number of people and DTI provides an indirect and limited view of brain connections, he said.