Could Psychedelics Support Healthy Aging and Longevity?
Psychedelics have so far largely been studied for mental health, but increasing research is now beginning to study how they may affect aging.
Case studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that psychedelics may reduce chronic pain and inflammation, impact the aging process, and even treat neurodegenerative conditions.
With an increase in aging populations across the world, age-related diseases such as neurodegeneration and cardiovascular disease are also rising, and researchers hope that new studies could help us better understand the potential of psychedelics in this area.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US recently backed a five-year psychedelics study with $21 million that will examine therapeutic potential of psychedelics in adults aged over 65.
The project INSPIRE Network (INnovative Science of Psychedelic Inclusive Research in Elders) programme, is the first government-backed clinical research to study psychedelics in an older population. The first stage of the study will first examine the safety and efficacy of psilocybin and LSD, and the second phase will examine psychedelic therapy for treating chronic pain.
The Future of Healthy Aging
Better living and longevity is booming. Improving healthspan and lifespan is becoming increasingly popular as science advances.
Gary Brecka, human biologist and host of The Ultimate Human podcast has been analysing blood and genetic markers, including mortality analysis, for more than 20 years.
He believes that future gains for longevity won’t come from a single therapeutic, but from prevention and earlier detection by measuring and correcting the basics early, including blood biomarkers, methylation and genetic markers, metabolic health and insulin sensitivity, sleep and stress.
In his work, Brecka has seen that the biggest predictors of longevity are “consistent and mostly free”, including muscle health, consistent sleep and metabolic health such as blood sugar and chronic inflammation levels.
“That quiet background inflammation sits underneath most age-related diseases,” Brecka tells States of Mind.
None of it is exotic. The people who stay sharp and strong into their eighties didn’t find a secret. They protected the basics for decades. Medicine is extraordinary at rescuing you once something has broken. Where it has historically been weakest is seeing the problem years before the crisis, when it is still cheap and easy to change.
This is the gap that research needs to fill, says Brecka; better biomarkers, better imaging, wearables and testing that catch decline while it is still a trend and “not yet a diagnosis”.
“If you can show someone the earliest signal that their metabolism, their sleep or their inflammation is drifting, and give them time to act, you prevent far more disease than you will ever treat,” he adds.
While preventative health measures such as exercising and getting good sleep may keep us physically more capable for longer, currently, age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s have no treatments available, and drug development failure rates for neurodegeneration sit above 99%. This underscores an urgent need for new and innovative therapies that can address or prevent such conditions.
Psychedelics are a category of drug that have recently seen a resurgence of interest following 50 years of prohibition. While they are still Schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, recent years have seen an increase in the number of studies exploring their benefit for mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety and PTSD.
Researchers are now also beginning to explore psychedelic’s potential benefits for aging and age-related diseases.
For example, a groundbreaking study in mouse models has shown that psilocybin for example, increased telomere length — which is linked to slower aging — and a case study of an advanced Alzheimer’s patient that was given a high dose of psilocybin found the patient began recalling memories and speaking again.
While animal models do not always translate into humans, and one case study is not a scientific finding, these developments have sparked new conversation around psychedelic compounds for longevity.
Equally, it has been posited that the benefits that psychedelics have for mental health may also help to improve healthspan, which focuses on physical, cognitive and social health.
Brecka has become interested in this area of research, and highlights that emerging evidence points to the compounds appearing to have “a real effect” on the brain’s capacity to heal and rewire itself through neuroplasticity.
“Neuroplasticity is central to the aging brain,” says Brecka. “It’s the ability to keep forming new connections, supported by things like brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which even a fifteen-minute walk can raise.
“The mechanism is plausible and worth taking seriously.”
However, he emphasises that the strongest evidence for psychedelics so far is in mental health such as depression, trauma, and addiction, which is work that is taking place in supervised clinical trials, not people experimenting on their own.
“For neurodegeneration specifically, conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the evidence is much earlier — more preclinical than proven,” Brecka says.
“It is a promising mechanism and has real research momentum, but it’s a long way from anything established for the aging brain.”
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Psilocybin And Aging In Healthy Adults
To generate more foundational research in older adults, UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics (BCSP) has launched a study on psilocybin’s ability to promote healthy aging.
The PLASTICITY (Psychedelic Longitudinal Aging Study In Cognitively Healthy Older Adults) Study will investigate memory, perception, emotion, and the structure and function of the brain.
Having dosed its first patient already, the researchers are working to address the gap where older people have been historically excluded from psychedelic studies, measuring changes in psychological traits such as depression and anxiety, and structural brain changes using MRI.
Speaking to States of Mind, Tyler Toueg, a Ph.D. candidate in the neuroscience graduate program at BCSP, highlights that there are a variety of different psychological characteristics and personality traits that have been associated with successful aging.
“Problems such as depression, anxiety, stress, and rumination are all bad for aging, whereas awe, purpose in life and emotion regulation are associated with better aging outcomes,” says Toueg.
“Research suggests that psilocybin promotes the things that are good for aging and reduces the things that are bad for aging.”
The study will conduct follow-ups over two months with participants to assess any changes that could be associated with better aging outcomes.
For example, animal models demonstrate that psilocybin increases the number of synaptic connections in the hippocampus. The team says that this could potentially counteract neural changes associated with aging, and that the study will be among the first to measure this in an older population.
“I’m really interested in looking at structural brain changes that we can assess with MRI,” says Toueg.
“There’s been a lot of work in animals using invasive tools to show the effect of psychedelics on synaptic density and structural plasticity. With age we see reductions in synaptic density and structural connections, and it seems like psilocybin might promote that.”
“If we can detect with MRI an indirect signal of those structural changes, I think that would be an interesting thing to see, along with what the implications of that are, such as whether structural brain change is associated with changes in behavior as well.”
Michael Silver, a leading neuroscientist in the study of psychedelics and Director of BCSP tells States of Mind that the team hopes to obtain generalizable results across all older people on how psychedelics affect emotion, perception, cognition, and structural and functional brain changes to create a platform for more targeted, treatment-based research.
“There’s a lot of clinical trials in the US and elsewhere testing the efficacy of psychedelics combined with therapy for treatment of a disorder, which is the information that’s needed to evaluate new medical treatments and therapeutics,” says Silver.
“That process can be very successful in discovering new medicines that can be used in treatment. By working with healthy adults, we are characterizing basic mechanisms, in the hopes that that will eventually lead to more precise and more effective treatments.”
Silver and Toueg say the study will not be examining neurodegeneration directly, but will measure different qualities through subjective reports of people’s experience and relating those reports to any brain changes, long-term changes in emotional regulation, and how people respond to emotionally provocative videos.
“We will also examine how psilocybin improves or changes learning and memory abilities, along with the brain correlates of that,” says Silver.
“We have many different measures, each of which is its own very interesting scientific and possibly clinically relevant question. Then we’re able to relate all these measures to each other to get deeper insights into the mechanisms.”
When it comes to aging, Brecka says, for him, that the most interesting part isn’t necessarily the classic psychedelic experience, its psychoplastogens — analogues of psychedelic compounds that do not have a “visionary” component.
“The next generation of compounds being designed to encourage that same neuroplasticity, potentially without the hallucinogenic effect,” says Brecka.
If that research pans out, and that is a big if, you would have something that supports the brain’s ability to repair itself in a controlled, predictable way a clinician could actually work with. That’s a serious longevity conversation because a brain that can keep rewiring is a brain that ages better.
However, he also emphasizes that even the most exciting neuroplasticity tool is a refinement on top of a foundation.
“You cannot rebuild a brain that is starved of sleep, drowning in stress and running on ultra-processed food. Fix the foundation first. Then, as this science matures, and if it is done properly, legally and under real supervision, these tools may have a genuine place.”
