Groundbreaking New Alzheimer’s Treatment Reverses Decline

Credit: Google/Gemini

A new treatment tested on an 80-year-old Japanese-American woman, who had suffered from over a decade of cognitive and functional degeneration, was able to successfully reverse several aspects of that decline, allowing her to regain partial speech and motor abilities.

Alzheimer’s currently affects over seven million Americans, initially impacting functions such as memory, before eventually leading to severe declines in cognitive function and physical and motor skills.

By 2050, that number is projected to nearly double and reach a staggering 13 million individuals.

The patient tested in the study had reached the advanced stages of the disease, only able to say one-syllable words, and experiencing severe executive dysfunction.

Researchers from the Associação Cruz de Ankh in São Paulo, Brazil began administering 5 grams of psilocybin, a hallucinogenic compound that can be found in many species of mushrooms, frequently known as “magic mushrooms.”

Roughly 19 hours after the psilocybin dose was administered, the patient began speaking more.

Over the next month, the patient’s memory, speech and motor functions continued to improve. She received a second, 3 -gram dose a month after the initial dose. This led to even further improvements in cognitive and motor functions.

The study was published in the scientific journal, Frontiers in Neuroscience.

The authors note in their conclusion that the findings are limited to the sample being just a single test subject, and that their findings should not yet be interpreted as a “reversal of Alzheimer’s.” Rather, they believe that this study raises the possibility that certain functions believed to have been lost over the course of the disease, may in fact become “temporarily accessible under specific neuromodulatory conditions.”

Prior research has established that psilocybin allows new connections in the brain to form, and they have been studied as a potential treatment for treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

A 2020 study conducted by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found that a single dose could actually relieve depression for an astounding  five years. However, the exact mechanism by which the compound alters a person’s brain chemistry is not fully understood by medical researchers.

Due to its psychedelic properties, psilocybin is also used illicitly, which can potentially result in vivid and terrifying hallucinations, known colloquially as a “bad trip.”