"Woman Crippled by Alzheimer’s Resumes Lively Conversations After Psilocybin Mushrooms Unlocked Her Memory
From the May issue of *Frontiers in Neuroscience* comes the truly remarkable case study of a woman crippled by Alzheimer’s recovering speech, bladder control, and motor function after a single dose of psilocybin mushrooms.
Living with Alzheimer’s for a decade and under family supervision for almost as long, the Japanese American woman in her 80s was given 5 grams of psychedelic mushrooms, went into a deep, sweaty sleep, awoke, and launched into an autobiographical tirade for 4 hours.
This was a woman on death’s door from the most common form of neurodegenerative disease. She had, for 5 years, spoken only single syllables, had lost control of her urinary continence, was unable to stand or walk without assistance, couldn’t recognize anyone or much of anything from her past or family, and suffered from severe motor skill dysfunction so that she could neither perform basic grooming nor dress herself.
No details about why the woman was the subject of the experiment have been revealed by media reports, but the 3 research scientists from the Medical Department at Associação Cruz de Ankh, in São Paulo, authors of this observational case study, administered one 5-gram dose of mushrooms containing the psychedelic compound psilocybin—one of the most common found in nature—and documented its effects.
(. . .)
On the one hand, this is clearly a groundbreaking finding. Billions of dollars have been invested into finding a drug that can slow or reverse Alzheimer’s, and most if not all attempts have been met with failure. At the same time, rates of Alzheimer’s disease around the world are increasing, placing an ever larger burden of care on families and society.
(. . .)
The study didn’t include any brain scans, control groups, double-blinding, sensitivity analysis, placebo controls—nor even standardized cognitive tests. In short, it lacked anything that would allow for extrapolation of this totally observational finding beyond what it was: the reported observations of a few people on a single person.
'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,' the authors write.
In other words, everything which seems to be taken away by Alzheimer’s may still be there, and that there exists some chemical key that can unlock it. Is psilocybin that key? Hopefully more, higher-quality research can follow-up on this incredible case study."
