The Viral Psilocybin-for-Alzheimer's Paper Gets Worse the More We Look at It
We sat down with Dr. Tyler Black to break down the viral psilocybin-for-Alzheimer's paper receiving hype throughout the psychedelic industry. The paper — "Transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer's disease following high-dose psilocybin-containing mushroom administration: a case report" — was described by longevity guru Bryan Johnson as "Biblical." But the more we scrutinized it, the worse it looked.
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:00] I love my favorite is the next word, the next sentence though. Exact quantitative temperature measurements were not available. I They didn't even measure it. They had a hand on the forehead. It's the easiest measurement in the world to get is temperature. It's like that to me that was like the biggest red flag was reading that exact quantitative measurements on temperature were not available. I did want to point out, and people recognize what they're describing there with sweating, sleeping, hyperothermia, like they're reporting a near miss death of serotonin syndrome, I suspect, and they're purporting it as a success and regarding kind of the current research in psychedelics, I think one of the topics we wanted transition into was a couple of specific recent pieces of research.
[00:53] Mike, I don't know if you had any you wanted to discuss up top. I know the most recent one was kind of regarding this N of one study with like elderly woman with Alzheimer's. You've got Brian Johnson tweeting about this, saying it's biblical and all of these people sort of hyping up this recent publication. How this came to me was our colleague Normy me just sent kind of this nondescript account. They just said like, "Can you believe it? This is like cures Alzheimer's." Right. Right. And it's like, okay. So, I looked at it and I'm like, "This is actually kind of interesting if I had this hunch, you know, that like okay, you know, it's a neuro Alzheimer's and neurodeenerative disorder. Maybe there's something there with neuroplasticity and all this stuff." So this tweet that we the tweet that has been sent to us by Normmy has this like AI infographic about like the timeline of how the psilocybin goes you know into this person with Alzheimer's the things that it changes and she comes out like better right so I kind
[01:54] Of dug in to find the real paper which took a while actually once I finally got to the study link you know at first I was like this is this could be interesting you know but first thing is it's n equals 1 there was one person it's an observational case study that they're very clear about and I kind of read papers like outside to in. So the first thing I do is I look at the abstract then I kind of look at the like funding declarations and the conflicts of interest look for the limitations. So some immediate green flags to me which is not typical for like psychedelic studies are that they're like obsessively stating the limitations like okay this is N of one. This is you know only one person this is just an observational study and so forth. Then I look at the conflict of interest. no conflicts of interest, no phoning declaration whatsoever. Then I look at the ethical statement and it's a little bit weird.
[02:41] It says like no ethical statement needed or something like that. We can look at the paper, but it was like vaguely like I was like okay whatever if you say so. And then when we kind of look into the, you know, actual paper, the first thing I kind of noticed after these flags was they're not actually measuring subjective effects at all, which is very common for psychedelic papers, right? Like normally they're trying to figure out depression changes and M RDS and all that but there was no subjective effects because this person wasn't really in a place to be commenting on their subjective effects due to the nature of the condition right so it's 100% objective so I'm like that's exciting you know we can actually see a paper that somebody's it's an observational study but they're actually not doing anything like they're giving five grams of Enigma mushrooms to you Octogenarian with Alzheimer's and then she falls asleep for like 19 hours and while she's asleep for these 19 hours, they're measuring like her heart
[03:42] Rate and they're noticing distress. They're seeing that she's kind of, you know, her heart rate's going up, sweating, that kind of thing. I don't know if sweating is actually in the paper, but the paper is showing that there's like distressing signals. It's okay though, right? Like they're not intervening in any way. And then they're not but they're not really measuring anything else. So when you look into the paper, there's like this chart about like the things that have happened. And so one of the things was like she said she asked where somebody is like that was a result of this like after the 19 hours sleep she woke up and she asked where somebody was. And so this is like this huge improvement, right, from somebody that has Alzheimer's that isn't typically talking I guess. And then they noticed that her inconcence has improved.
[04:27] So, she wasn't peeing herself as often apparently, but there's not a lot of like data in terms of like how often was it before and how often is it now? And then I started digging into the authors and like the institution that that provided the paper. And so, they say it's this medical department of an association of the crews of the enh the cross of the enh paulo Brazil. So, I like dug in. I was like, what is this place? They're on the Brazilian registry as a church, a philosophical organization. Church, philosophical organization in the Brazilian registry with no medical department associated, no reported revenue. And it was created one year ago. There's zero public footprint on this institution at all other than that registered church in this in the Brazilian registry.
[05:19] And so like I said, you know, I was going through this thing like, okay, this could be interesting. You know, it's a little bit different than most psychical papers. Now it's kind of getting weird. And then upon closer inspection, it seemed to me, and I said this in the group chat, that it looks like a caretaker gave permission to a madeup new age religious legal entity in Brazil to give a frail woman in her 80s a heroic dose of mushrooms. They observed acute but expected dangerous symptoms and then noticed that she peed herself less often and maybe talked a little bit more for a while. So then they gave her more and then we're supposed to take their word for it that she's just still doing better than before and then from here published it under neuropharmacology. Can I just pull up and read this acute phase real quick because you did a good job of breaking it down but I want to make sure we get the actual here.
[06:10] So it's this section here and it says the acute phase of the first section was characterized by clinically suspected hyperothermia, profuse sweating, profound sumance. Yeah, it's like a sleeping right and a prolonged deep sleep like state. I My favorite is the next word, the next sentence though. Exact quantitative temperature measurements were not available. I you didn't even measure it. They had a hand on the forehead. It's the easiest measurement in the world to get is temperature. It's like that to me that was like the biggest red flag was reading that exact quantitative measurements on temperature were not available. I did want to point out do and people recognize what they're describing there with sweating, sleeping, hyperothermia like they're reporting a near miss death of serotonin syndrome I suspect and they're purporting it as a success.
[07:01] I mean that that is classic serotonurgic syndrome that they're describing right there. a quick change in level of consciousness, hyper, hyperothermia, and a change in sweating and autonomic abnormalities. That's I mean, that's serotonin syndrome. That lady could have died. And they're reporting their near miss as a success. It's quite something. That's the article on the day that I that it was released had 15,000 views already in Frontiers. And like then I'm like this is so sad. Like what are the comment? Now I go into the Twitter comments and I'm like these people are just going to everyone's going to assume that okay we need to give psilocybin mushrooms to our demented you know parents that are like on their way out and maybe they can come back and chat with me again.
[07:53] And so then we looked at the tweets and I think James you have that one. Yeah. Synergy. I go game with psilocybin. Like they're go they're shooting into this like really dangerous frame of thought. Yeah. Like you see these really desperate people saying synergy I gain with psilocybin and then asking Grock for its opinion on all of this. Yeah. I mean that's dystopian. But I mean five grams I don't know this particular strain but this sounds like quite a dose. And her reaction is exactly what we would expect for serotonin syndrome. This lady needed to be in an ER and actually getting her quantitative temperature measured and she was in some hospice somewhere almost dying and then they're reporting it as a success. It's the scariest report I've seen especially the way it's being carried as from this one NF1 report there are going to be many people who want to use psilocybin in their demented grandmother or grandfather and that's really really sad.
[08:51] I was going to say I just feel like it's also odd that like a lot of the like things that they highlight happening happen 19 hours after administration. Like there's this line in here that is approximately 19 hours after administration. The patients spontaneously initiated autobiographical conversation lasting several hours. During the second session, the patient remained significantly more verbally expressive throughout the experience and described emotionally positive imagery involving surfing with her son on a peaceful island. I just feel like it's I don't know, feels odd to me that it would be like 19 hours later and it doesn't seem like they dug into that at all. They just assumed that it was definitely psilocybin related. I don't know that just Well, and correct me if I'm wrong, Tyler.
[09:38] You're the doctor. I but like Alzheimer's is a first of all they actually also didn't say that they confirmed Alzheimer's with this woman. they just said that there that she's dement has dementia and is like presumably you know an Alzheimer's case but in this kind these kind of diseases are transient anyway like they people come you know they talk and you know if we're dealing with something akin to a delirium or they're feeling a little bit better or they were feeling worse before like you know the big problem with this is there's no real clinical description aside from a few small sentences about what she was like before. You would expect in a case report to have a lot more detail and you would certainly want some sort of imaging to make sure that this wasn't vascular dementia or some kind of mixed dementia or something else like how they knew it was Alzheimer's like even the establishment of Alzheimer's like what was the course of her dementia and how did it come about is missing from this.
[10:35] It's not written like a case report at all. Case reports contain important information, but they usually contain enough information for you as a clinician to read it and understand, okay, I know the patient, I know the treatment, and I know what happened. They're never evidence of anything, but this you don't even understand the patient very well. You just have a description of how much they're better. Yeah. So, it's quite weird. Very weird case. Yeah. And just to make sure that we're like representing their conclusion correctly that they are concluding that residual functional capacity may persist in advanced Alzheimer's disease and can become transiently accessible following psilocybin induced modulation of largecale brain networks. Systemic investigation is warranted. So they're suggesting that all of the functionality that has kind of left within an Alzheimer's patient, like the degeneration of their disease is actually secretly there and potentially transiently accessible through psilocybin, which yeah,
[11:36] There's no reason to think that's the case. In fact, pretty much everything we know about the way that the brain is attacked in Alzheimer's disease is loss of things that don't come back. You know, there's no like definitely, you know, and anyone who's worked with people with dementia knows that people have good weeks and bad weeks and good months and bad months and it's not a linear decline, but you know, you can do an autopsy in an Alzheimer's brain and this isn't just, you know, they weren't accessing their great brain. Their brain is being absolutely destroyed. Yeah. And it's really really sad to see this happen. and worse it, you know, like you said, this is an uncontrolled anecdote from a non-academic clinic. No scans whatsoever, no scales, not even measuring the fever, like how high did the fever get would be nice to know.
[12:24] And then probably serotonin syndrome reported as a success, you know, this was really dangerous what they did. And as a quick postcript, we wanted to make sure to come in and highlight this tweet a little bit more because we brought it up but didn't quite get to talk about it enough. So, I'm going to go ahead and throw it on screen. It's this Brian Johnson tweet here where he says that this study is biblical. A woman in her 80s, 10 years into Alzheimer's, hadn't spoken a full sentence in 5 years, takes one 5 g dose of psilocybin. She slept 19 hours and woke up and spoke for hours about her life. She recognized family and held real conversations, regained bladder control after 5 years, walked on her own and dressed herself. Gains held for weeks. Do they even actually say that she hadn't spoken a full sentence in 5 years in the study?
[13:13] We can look at the background in this. During the preceding 5 years, verbal output beca became predominantly monosyic. Predominantly monoselabic. That's like that's very different. That's very different. accompanied by severe reduction in spontaneous interaction, chronic urinary incontinence, executive dysfunction, impaired mobility, dysphasia, and marked dependent marketked dependence on activities of daily living. So, it also doesn't explicitly say that she wasn't able to walk on her own ever or dress herself ever. It just said that she had less ability to do such, right? Like, it seems like what he's saying is this is a zero to one. like he she went from completely incapable, incapacitated to suddenly able to do all these new things, which is not how it's even presented in this case presentation.
[14:04] Yeah. As far as I can tell, I believe this is the only like real background information like maybe this the diagnosis of advanced Alzheimer's disease had been established approximately 10 years prior clinically but somewhere in there they said that the yeah although the clinical course was considered most consistent with advanced Alzheimer's disease formal biioarker confirmation and advanced imaging were not available in the present real world setting so they don't know you know. Yeah. Yeah. And that the vascular dementia is an alternative. That's what Tyler had mentioned. So it's like I have a grandmother who, you know, at first I thought she had Alzheimer's, but then it had the scans done and it was vascular dementia. It was kind of triggered by a COVID infection.
[14:50] So it's like that happens all the time that like something is assumed to be Alzheimer's and it's not actually. I think some of the boosters would say it's transdiagnostic, you know, like they would say it doesn't need to be Alzheimer's. It's good for it all. You know, all forms of dementia can be addressed with this neuroplasticity boosting substance. But I did also just want to emphasize like, you know, the who Brian Johnson is because without the context, it's not as clear why this is being mobilized in the way that it is. And so he's someone who's really been pushing this psilocybin for longevity and psychedelics broadly for longevity. And he's also mentioned like in the Sheila Loves Guardian article that also quoted me, he mentions that like part of his goal in this new influencer kind of mode that he's in is to in his words teach people to yearn for the sea of like believing in his vision of like transhumanist kind of longevity future.
[15:47] And so this is becoming like another rhetorical marketing chip for this broader Silicon Valley kind of like hype mission that these guys are on. Right. I want to note something else on there. Like he says that the effects persisted for weeks, but if I'm not mistaken, they gave her more. It wasn't like this one 5 g dose did everything and for weeks later it was better. They did do two doses. So the second one was after a month using three grams and associated with greater verbal expressivity, improved facial mimicry, spontaneous humor, emotionally balanced autobiographical imagery and increased agility while walking. The patient spontaneously stated, "It is pleasant to come here."
[16:35] I feel like this is the type of description that would be published, you know, with the MK Ultra funded, you know, you and Cameron, you know, psychic driving depattering, like they would describe people with in the same type of way after that research and with, you know, in retrospect, we realized like, oh, it's because they had this enthusiastic frame that they were filtering things through that they're seeing things in a very positive light. Thanks a lot for checking out that video. If you want early access to interviews like this or the ability to support us to do more interviews like this, you can check us out on patreon.com. patreon.com/psymposia. You'll receive early access adfree episodes as well as access to our group chats. You can join up at the annual level and receive some merch as well, including blotter art like the one behind me there, or some different kinds of stickers and buttons.
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