🚨New paper alarm🚨
Excited to share our new publication that breaks new grounds for
#psychedelic medicine: the first data on
#psilocybin’s effects in any neurodegenerative disease, specifically psilocybin for the treatment of
#Parkinson's disease!
It was a phase 1 feasibility and tolerability study on 12 patients with all the usual limitations of such studies, e.g. lack of control condition. The treatment consisted of 2 psilocybin sessions, the first with 10mg and then a larger 25mg dose 2 weeks later. As usual psilocybin was coupled with therapy.
The study's primary objective was to treat the mood dysfunction associated with Parkinson's. We got the usual large and positive treatment effects as other psilocybin trials: three months after the last dose MADRS significantly improved by 9.3 points, corresponding to 1.0 standardized mean difference (SMD; i.e. large effect). Anxiety, as captured by the Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale, also significantly improved by 3.8 points, corresponding to 0.7 SMD.
More surprisingly, Parkinson's symptoms also improved post-psilocybin! We captured Parkinson's with the standard MDS-UPDRS assessment, , and patients significantly improved in all domains at every post-treatment timepoint (!!!) with mostly moderate-to-large effect sizes. Benefits persisted at the 3 months post last dose timepoint.
No serious adverse events (AEs) occurred. As expected, most AEs occurred during psilocybin sessions (anxiety, nausea, headache) and were self-resolving and transient.
Even better than the paper that we are already running the follow-up phase 2 trial! If you know anyone in the Bay area who could be interested, please let them know:
psychedelics.ucsf.edu/#Studi….
Full paper:
tinyurl.com/y9rcp7mk
Celebrating with
@EllenBradleyMD,
@thebandlab and the whole
@UCSF's
@TrPR_Program crew! 🙏🫂❤️