On a quiet plot of land in rural New Mexico, Jeff Deming feels like he’s really living, once again.
“Mentally, it’s day and night,” he said.
He’s able to do the things that make him happy, like woodworking, despite living with Parkinson’s Disease.
“Physically, I feel better than I did 2-3 years ago,” he said.
Deming credits the treatment he received during a first-of-its-kind clinical study he participated in at the University of California, San Francisco: Psilocybin therapy for people with Parkinson’s Disease.
“This is very cliché, but it truly gave me my life back,” he said.
Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in ‘magic mushrooms.’ When administered in controlled, clinical research settings, it has shown promise in treating depression and anxiety, both of which are mood symptoms associated with Parkinson’s that are linked to a faster physical decline.
“The neurodegeneration that is happening isn’t just impacting motor circuitry – it’s impacting a lot of brain circuitry. That creates this huge burden of symptoms that we often overlook and don’t talk about enough, maybe,” said Dr. Ellen Bradley, of UCSF. “We were really surprised by how well this trial went.”
Bradley and a team of researchers at UCSF are trying to figure out how Psilocybin may help treat mood dysfunction and more in those living with the neurodegenerative disease.
“This is a first step, and now we’ve opened the door to being able to really investigate the effects of Psilocybin for people with Parkinson’s,” she said.
12 patients participated in this first-round study, which involved a first and second course of Psilocybin treatment.
“We had folks do a lower dose of Psilocybin – a 10 mg dose initially – and monitored them for a couple of weeks to see how that went,” Bradley said. “If it did go well, if we didn’t have safety concerns, then they were eligible for the full therapeutic dose of 25 mg.”
All 12 patients were able to complete both courses of treatment without reporting any serious side effects, according to Bradley.
“We want to find out not just does Psilocybin therapy work, but if it does, how does it work? That mechanistic piece is so important,” she said. “Can it change the brain’s ability to adapt to its environment and to rewire itself?”
While there were no serious adverse effects reported, every patient didn’t have the same life-changing experience as Deming says he experienced. Though many did report their motor and cognitive functions improved afterwards, per Bradley.
“We don’t have a reason to believe that this is a treatment that is going to be a good fit for every patient. That is never really our expectation in medicine. But our goal is to figure out when is it the right treatment and how much for which patient,” Bradley said.
Bradley says her team is scaling up their work and are in the process of recruiting for a larger study, due to the success with the initial research.
“That was really exciting just to see that promising safety profile in this initial pilot. That kind of gives us a green light to go forward with more in-depth research,” she said. “We really desperately need new treatments for Parkinson’s. It’s a very quickly growing disease that’s becoming more and more prevalent in our population, so, we really feel like we have to be investigating every possible route that could mean new treatments for patients.”
Two years removed from his controlled Psilocybin dosing, Deming says he feels better now than he did when he received his initial diagnosis four years ago.
“Something about this experience just freed everything back up so I could think again, I could dream again,” he said.
He’d like to see more research into psychedelic therapies for a range of conditions, with the hopes that more people will be able to reclaim the reins of life, as he has.
“There’s been such a stigma against the research with it,” he said. “It is definitely worth looking more closely at.”