An 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s; largely monosyllabic, incontinent, dysphagic, and profoundly disengaged: received a single, high-dose intervention of psilocybin mushrooms. What followed challenges our entire understanding of neurodegenerative decline. Published recently in Frontiers in Neuroscience, this case report details a rapid, multi-domain functional reversal from a single five-gram dose. Let's look at the data.

Hope or Hype?

Psychedelic have show theoretical and practical promise in elderly care however, despite a renaissance in psychedelic research, adults over 65 make up just 1.4% of participants in modern clinical trials, a striking gap given that late-life depression, existential distress at end of life, and neurodegenerative disease are among the conditions for which psychedelic-assisted therapies are most often proposed. This lecture examines what the current evidence actually supports, where it falls silent, and what clinicians and researchers should be asking next.

This lecture, performed by Voytek Bereza a Prescribing Pharmacist from the UK will survey the emerging data across three clinical domains: treatment-resistant depression in older adults, existential distress in palliative care (the most mature evidence base, building on the psilocybin-for-cancer-anxiety trials), and the largely preclinical case for psychedelics in Alzheimer's and dementia, where neuroplasticity and neuroinflammation provide a mechanistic rationale but human data remain anecdotal. Safety considerations specific to ageing populations — cardiovascular reactivity, polypharmacy, fall risk, and cognitive vulnerability, will be discussed alongside encouraging early signals, including phase 1 data on repeated low-dose LSD in healthy older volunteers.

All proceeds from Ticket sales will be donated to Protecting the Cloud Forest of Los Cedros, through The Rainforest Information Centre.

Contact the host of Psychedelics and Ageing: Hope, Hype, and the Science