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Can psilocybin support healthy aging?

Posted on by Alyssa
Three friends at the edge of the water on a wide open beach
24
Aug

The honest answer is that we do not know yet, and we would rather say so plainly. No human trial has ever tested psilocybin against a marker of aging, and the first one built to do that has not begun enrolling. What exists is one 2025 paper in cultured cells and female mice, contested inflammation findings, and older work on stress, sleep, alcohol and the people around you.

The study that put mushrooms and aging in the same sentence

In 2025, npj Aging published Kato and colleagues, “Psilocybin treatment extends cellular lifespan and improves survival of aged mice”. It is why anyone is asking this question, and it rewards a slow read, so here is what it found and what it did not.

Cells in a dish

The team grew human fetal lung fibroblasts, the IMR-90 line, in psilocin, which is what the body converts psilocybin into. At 10 µM the cells kept dividing 29 percent longer than untreated cells. At 100 µM the extension was 57 percent. Adult human skin fibroblasts at 100 µM showed 51 percent, with less cellular senescence and lower oxidative stress.

Two things sit alongside that. 100 µM in a dish is far above anything an oral dose produces in human plasma, so the biggest effects came from an exposure no person has. And every in vitro n here is technical replicates rather than biological replicates, the same batch measured again instead of independent experiments, which makes the results look steadier than the biology can promise.

The markers moved as hoped. SA-beta-gal staining fell, p21 and p16 fell, PCNA and pRB rose, SIRT1 rose, GADD45a fell, oxidative stress and Nox4 fell, Nrf2 rose. Telomere length was preserved rather than lengthened, a smaller claim than the one that circulates. DNA methylation and epigenetic clocks, what most people mean by biological age, were not measured.

The mice

The same team treated aged mice. C57BL/6J, female only by design, 19 months old at the start, roughly 60 to 65 human years. Twenty eight received vehicle and thirty received psilocybin by oral gavage, 5 mg/kg in the first month then 15 mg/kg monthly, ten treatments across ten months.

At the end, 24 of the 30 psilocybin mice were alive, 80 percent, against 14 of the 28 vehicle mice, 50 percent, log-rank p of 0.014. That is a real result. The version that travels online is a 30 percent increase in lifespan. What the paper reports is a 30 percentage point survival gap on the day it stopped, which it did once one group hit 50 percent mortality, so median and maximum lifespan were never determined.

The authors are direct about the rest. “Researchers were not blinded to group allocation.” Single sex by design. Cancer risk unaddressed, which matters in an old mouse cohort where tumours are common. Long-term dosing unstudied. Maximal lifespan unknown. The fur and hair improvements that got passed around were, in the paper’s words, “not quantitatively measured.”

How other researchers have read it

Lerer, writing in npj Aging in 2026, compared the ages at death of 11 prominent figures in psychedelic research and culture against 12 cancer researchers and 5 aging researchers. The psychedelic group did not outlive their biomedical peers. The caveats are large. Eleven people is too few to be a cohort, the data was compiled with help from an AI assistant, and the author holds equity in a biotech.

Peter Attia’s critique is harder to set aside. The endpoint was forced rather than reached. The dose was corrected twice, by allometric scaling and by half-life, landing at a human equivalent of roughly 1.2 mg/kg monthly for years. One sex. One study, unreplicated. No comparison against compounds already established as geroprotectors, and no functional outcomes beyond whether the animals were alive.

The part we want to be straight with you about

No human trial has ever tested psilocybin against a marker of aging.

Not one, and that shapes everything else here. The first study designed to do it is NCT07719088, “An Examination of Psilocybin Effects on Biomarkers of Longevity, Healthy Aging, and Purpose in Life”, sponsored by Charles Raison. Phase 1, an estimated 50 participants, primary outcomes epigenetic clock profiling and Purpose in Life. Not yet recruiting, estimated start December 2026.

Two more are recruiting. NCT06367738 on a single dose and structural plasticity in healthy adults aged 60 to 85, and NCT07516405 on safety and tolerability in adults aged 65 to 85. Basic safety in that age group is still being established.

What we already know about how a life wears on a body

Stress gets charged to the body

Epel and colleagues, PNAS 2004. Fifty eight healthy premenopausal women, 39 of them mothers caring for a chronically ill child and 19 controls. The women reporting the highest perceived stress had telomeres averaging 3,110 base pairs against 3,660 in the lowest stress group, a 550 base pair difference the paper calls “the equivalent of at least one decade of additional aging”. Telomerase activity was 48 percent lower, and years of caregiving correlated with telomere length at r=-0.40, p<0.01.

The design limits what it can tell us. Cross-sectional, measured once, so it shows an association rather than a cause. Fifty eight people, one sex, one particular kind of caregiving.

Seeman and colleagues, PNAS 2001, followed 1,189 adults aged 70 to 79 for seven years. Each unit increase in allostatic load, a composite of physiological wear, came with a mortality odds ratio of 1.23, 95 percent CI 1.09 to 1.39. Adam and colleagues, 2017, pooled 179 associations from 80 studies and found flatter diurnal cortisol slopes tracked with worse health at an average r of 0.147, largest for immune and inflammation outcomes at r=0.288. Both observational, and those correlations are small.

Inflammation, where the evidence pulls two ways

Mason and colleagues, 2023, ran a placebo-controlled parallel group study in 60 healthy volunteers at 0.17 mg/kg. Acutely, TNF-alpha fell while IL-1beta, IL-6 and CRP did not move. At seven days TNF-alpha was back at baseline, IL-6 and CRP still lower. Put through a psychosocial stressor afterwards, psilocybin did not alter the stress response. These were healthy people with low baseline inflammation, so little room to come down.

A second dataset points the other way. DiRenzo and colleagues presented an abstract at ACR Convergence in 2023, a conference poster and not peer reviewed, pooling sera from 91 participants across three randomised trials. At one week or less, IL-8 increased (beta 0.164, p=0.004) and TNF-alpha increased (beta 0.10, p=0.027). At four weeks and beyond, IL-10 and IFN-alpha increased. On TNF-alpha that is the opposite direction from Mason.

So the honest position is that psilocybin does something to circulating cytokines and nobody can yet say what. If you have read that it lowers inflammation, that comes from one of these studies without the other beside it.

Feeling better later in life, which is a different question

Anderson and colleagues, eClinicalMedicine 2020. Eighteen gay-identified cisgender men, mean age 59.2, range 50 to 66, all older long-term AIDS survivors living with demoralization, given psilocybin at 0.3 to 0.36 mg/kg inside group therapy. Demoralization Scale-II scores fell by a mean of 5.78 points (SD 6.01) at three months, effect size 0.97 (95 percent CI 0.43 to 1.57), and 66.7 percent met the threshold for a clinically meaningful change.

It was open-label and single-arm with no control group, so everyone knew what they had taken. No serious adverse reactions. Also 14 of the 18 had at least a moderate expected adverse reaction, one a post-traumatic flashback and one a methamphetamine relapse.

Two cancer trials from 2016 held up better. Ross and colleagues, double-blind crossover controlled with niacin, 29 people completing the first dose, mean age 56.28, and at six and a half months roughly 60 to 80 percent still held clinically significant reductions in depression or anxiety. Griffiths and colleagues, randomised double-blind crossover, 51 people, mean age 56.3, about 80 percent still improved at six months and corroborated by community observer ratings. Once everyone has crossed over there is no untreated arm left, so those follow-ups are uncontrolled.

Then the part that gives us pause. Griffiths and colleagues followed 36 healthy volunteers for 14 months after a high dose session. 58 percent rated it among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives, 67 percent among the five most spiritually significant, 64 percent said it increased their wellbeing, and 58 percent met criteria for a complete mystical experience. Yet of every measure assessed of personality, affect, quality of life and spirituality, only the mystical experience scale differed from screening. People said their lives had changed. The instruments mostly did not agree, and both of those can be true.

If a full dose is the territory you are curious about, our guide to macrodosing walks through what it asks of you.

What the evidence keeps pointing back to

Li and colleagues pooled the Nurses’ Health Study, 78,865 people, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, 44,354 people, across up to 34 years and 42,167 deaths. They scored five low-risk habits.

  • Never smoking
  • A BMI between 18.5 and 24.9
  • At least 30 minutes a day of moderate to vigorous activity
  • Moderate alcohol intake
  • A high quality diet

People with all five had an all-cause mortality hazard ratio of 0.26 against people with none, 95 percent CI 0.22 to 0.31. From age 50 that is 43.1 more years of life for women and 37.6 for men, against 29.0 and 25.5. A gain of 14.0 years (11.8 to 16.2) and 12.2 (10.1 to 14.2). Observational, health-professional cohorts, self-reported behaviour, and still the largest effect on human lifespan anyone has documented.

Arem and colleagues pooled 661,137 adults, 116,686 deaths, median 14.2 years of follow-up. Below the recommended minimum of 7.5 MET-hours a week, the mortality hazard ratio was 0.80. At one to two times the minimum, 0.69. At two to three times, 0.63. Benefit flattened at three to five times, 0.61. Ten times or more showed no harm. Most of the payoff arrives early, which is worth knowing if you are starting from nothing.

Sabia and colleagues followed 7,959 people in Whitehall II for 25 years, 521 dementia cases. Six hours of sleep or less against seven came with a hazard ratio of 1.22 at age 50 and 1.37 at age 60, and persistently short sleep at 50, 60 and 70 carried a 30 percent increase in dementia risk. Observational, and short sleep can be an early symptom of what it appears to predict. The 2024 Lancet Commission puts around 45 percent of dementia cases in the preventable column across 14 modifiable risk factors.

Alcohol is the uncomfortable one. We will not soften it. A Global Burden of Disease analysis drawing on 592 studies attributed 2.8 million deaths to alcohol in 2016 and concluded that “the level of alcohol consumption that minimised harm across health outcomes was zero”. The 2025 US Surgeon General advisory names alcohol the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the US, causal for at least seven cancer types, behind roughly 100,000 cancer cases and 20,000 cancer deaths a year, and recognised as a cancer risk by only 45 percent of Americans. Li’s score counted moderate drinking as low risk, which shows how far the reading has moved.

Three friends at the edge of the water on a wide open beach
Presence keeps outperforming nearly everything on a shelf.

Then the one everybody quotes. The Harvard Study of Adult Development began in 1938 with 268 Harvard men and later added 456 men from inner-city Boston, 724 in total, followed for more than 80 years. The line you have heard is that relationships at 50 predicted health at 80 better than cholesterol did. It is worth knowing that this line is not a peer-reviewed finding. It comes from the study’s director, Robert Waldinger, describing the cohort to the Harvard Gazette and in his TED talk.

A counterweight comes from inside the same study. Vaillant and colleagues, 1998, looked at 223 of the men and found the association between social support and physical health at 70 was “very much attenuated” once smoking, depression and alcohol abuse at age 50 were controlled for. Connection and the habits are tangled together, because people who feel held tend to smoke less and drink less.

Safety, which deserves the same care as the good news

Tagen and colleagues, 2023, looked at binding at the 5-HT2B receptor, implicated in valvular heart disease with older serotonergic drugs. All five psychedelics they studied bind 5-HT2B with potency equal to or greater than at 5-HT2A. Safety margins from typical microdoses came out greater than for known valvulopathogens, in their words “but not without potential risk”, with no animal or clinical studies appropriately designed to evaluate it. A 2026 systematic review by Xu and colleagues found no studies at all on psilocybin and valvulopathy.

That gap matters here, because the mouse protocol that produced the survival result was monthly dosing for ten months. Repeated dosing over years is exactly what nobody has studied in people.

On microdosing specifically, the placebo-controlled evidence is thin. Szigeti and colleagues ran a self-blinded study with 191 completers, the largest such trial at the time it published. Every psychological outcome improved in the microdose group. Every one also improved in the placebo group, with no significant between-group differences. The break-blind rate was 0.72, so most people worked out which arm they were in.

Where we sit in all of this

A hand holding a jar of Mycrologi Support Capsules
Support Capsules, the non-psychoactive daily one.

We are a mushroom company, so it would be easy to point at a mouse survival curve and let people draw a line to a jar on a shelf. That line does not exist. Every study above used pharmaceutical-grade psilocybin under a DEA licence at defined mg/kg doses, or psilocin in a dish at concentrations nobody swallows. Nothing we make has been tested for anything described here.

What we can say is smaller. A microdose is subtle yet noticeable, a soft lift in mood and ease with nothing dramatic about it, and people reach for it for how a Tuesday feels rather than for a biomarker. For the practice explained properly, start with the microdosing guide. Longevity Tea is 70mg of Golden Teacher per bag, caffeine free, twelve bags for $40. Support Capsules are Lion’s Mane, Reishi, Turkey Tail, Cordyceps and Guduchi with no psilocybin at all, from $16, for anyone who wants a daily mushroom habit with nothing psychoactive in it.

If you are unsure which makes sense for you, the two minute quiz asks how you want to feel and points you at one thing. The rest of what we make is gathered in one place.

The most useful thing here is also the least exciting. The evidence with real weight behind it still points at sleep, movement, what you drink and who is sitting across from you on an ordinary Tuesday. Mushrooms sit inside that picture rather than above it, and we will know more when the first human trial reads out. We will be reading it alongside you.

Sources

This article is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

Alyssa
Alyssa