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Is Ayahuasca Neurotoxic?

Migrated topic.
I do not personally believe Ayahuasca in and of itself has any actual medicinal properties...The same goes with other psychedelics, the medicine part comes from our interaction with the spiritual realm...

I doubt the ayahusca ally provides healing to rats that are force fed Ayahuasca....

-All spirit healing aside ...I would wager that the ayahuasca caused the rats to have a stressful experience, hence the damage.

Besides....are we sure that harmalas effect rats the same way as they effect people?.. I believe harmalas are quite toxic to dogs for example....
 
Interesting study, don't have time to look into it more but i did notice this skimming it

"Let’s do some math. The Wistar rats used in the study, the author tells us, weighed 200 g, which seems about right for their age of 30-45 days postnatal. The average lifespan of a Wistar rat is about two to three years — let’s say 30 months. Every day for 21 days each rat received 1 mL of ayahuasca — a dose of 0.005 mL/g.

An average human weighs about 70 kg and lives for about 840 months. Twenty-one days in a rat’s lifespan of 30 months is roughly equivalent to 20 months — or a bit more than a year and a half — in a human’s lifespan. Using the author’s own figures, the average human dose of ayahuasca in a ceremonial context is 150 mL — a dose of 0.002 mL/g.

In other words, the human equivalent of what the rats were given would be to drink two and a half doses of ayahuasca every day for more than a year and a half. Such human consumption of ayahuasca would be unusual."

Eliyahu said:
I do not personally believe Ayahuasca in and of itself has any actual medicinal properties...The same goes with other psychedelics, the medicine part comes from our interaction with the spiritual realm...

I doubt the ayahusca ally provides healing to rats that are force fed Ayahuasca....

-All spirit healing aside ...I would wager that the ayahuasca caused the rats to have a stressful experience, hence the damage.

Besides....are we sure that harmalas effect rats the same way as they effect people?.. I believe harmalas are quite toxic to dogs for example....

Not to dismiss the spiritual healings of mama aya..but you do realize that the beta carbolines in aya have been shown to have all sorts of medicinal properties such as anti-viral, anti-fungal etc etc? in some sense i think your making a false dichotomy
 
universecannon wrote:

Not to dismiss the spiritual healings of mama aya..but you do realize that the beta carbolines in aya have been shown to have all sorts of medicinal properties such as anti-viral, anti-fungal etc etc? in some sense i think your making a false dichotomy

You got me there.....I forgot about all that beta carboline stuff....

I suppose I was thinking along the lines of cancer healing or some miraculous healing event taking place....

Nice math work by the way!
 
I don't find this surprising at all. you gotta figure...oxidoreductases, which MAO is, function as the name suggests. When you inhibit this, you're exposing cells to whatever potential oxidative damage. this may especially be the case with something like 3,4-DMPEA, an intermediate metabolite found in cacti (recall that burnt posted a thread on this, with an attached paper. 3,4-DMPEA, like MPP+, caused a decrease in numbers of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra in mice. In any event, I'd just assume not take ayahuasca everyday, let the brain recover. think of your brain as a car engine..you cant' expect to redline it everyday, and not have any damage done.
 
Interesting observation Benzyme, it makes perfect sense.

MAO serves a protective role, prevent it from doing the job it has in the long term and there you go, death from oxidative stress.

It makes more sense (to me) that those who use aya nearly every day (shamanic traditions) have a restricted diet...
 
wohowoho..:roll:

Surprise surprise!

If you dose rats with giant ammounts of something for an extremely extended period of time non stop they might have adverse reactions!

Yes I know..it is interesting, sort of..but it is also of little relevance to anyone drinking ayahuasca..even people who microdose all the time and drink just 1 full dose weekly or so are not comparable here..I dont know anyone who microdoses for years daily, let alone takes 2-3 full doses daily for 2 years..so I think most of us are gunna be okay..and yeah we are not rats..hard to extrapolate anything in relation to what we are doing here from a study like that..why cant they just do a study that might be more relative to all of us as well? For once..

I microdosed harmalas daily for over a year anywhere from 5-10mgs harmalas or a few g caapi and I felt fine. I have not been daily microdising for months now but I do microdose every 4-5 days or so maybe..

One thing I have observed is at very large doses, where harmalas seem to me to produce effects more like wha I read of ibogaine(cus I never took it) there are other side effects that manifest and can last up to a week or more after the session. Some transient nausea can be present for days after as well as a sort of weird psychic sort of "tripping" effect..its hard to explain but my theory is that the pineal becomes super stimulated in these experiences and starts to put out lots of melatoning and pinoline etc for a time after such large doses..I would like to see more studies done in that area..I can imagine background MOAI going for some time after really heavy doses due to upregulation of the bodies own endogenous beta carbolines.
 
^the people who put out that study also seem to be biased and ill informed about what they are really talking about also.

"The study also appears to misread some of the current ayahuasca literature — and in an anti-ayahuasca direction. The author, for example, cites Robert Gable’s risk assessment of the ritual use of ayahuasca for the claim that we should consider “the use of ayahuasca as a positive reinforcer for potential abuse of other substances” — a claim that Gable himself explicitly refuses to make. In the same way, he cites Dennis McKenna’s article on the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca for the proposition that “the pattern of use by adherents of the syncretic religions can be classified as recreational,” whereas in this article McKenna clearly and consistently keeps religious and recreational uses distinct.

Putting these statements together, the message appears to be that religious groups that use ayahuasca do so indiscriminately and recreationally, and that the use of ayahuasca in these groups is a gateway to abuse of other substances. I am aware of no reputable study that supports such claims."
 
33 Reasons Why Animal Testing is Pointless by Phil Haylock

1. Less than 2% of human illnesses (1.16%) are ever seen in animals.

2. According to the former scientific executive of Huntingdon Life Sciences, animal tests and human results agree only '5%-25% of the time'.

3. 95% of drugs passed by animal tests are immediately discarded as useless or dangerous to humans.

4. At least 50 drugs on the market cause cancer in laboratory animals. They are allowed because it is admitted the animal tests are not relevant.

5. Procter & Gamble used an artificial musk despite it failing the animal tests, i.e., causing tumours in mice. They said the animal test results were 'of little relevance for humans'.

6. When asked if they agreed that animal experiments can be misleading 'because of anatomical and physiological differences between animals and humans', 88% of doctors agreed.

7. Rats are only 37% effective in identifying what causes cancer to humans. Flipping a coin would be more accurate.

8. Rodents are the animals almost always used in cancer research. They never get carcinomas, the human form of cancer, which affects membranes (e.g lung cancer). Their sarcomas affect bone and connecting tissue: the two cannot be compared.

9. Up to 90% of animal test results are discarded as they are inapplicable to man.

10. The results from animal experiments can be altered by factors such as diet and bedding. Bedding has been identified as giving cancer rates of over 90% and almost nil in the same strain of mice at different locations.

11. Sex differences among laboratory animals can cause contradictory results. This does not correspond with humans.

12. 9% of anaesthetised animals, intended to recover, die.

13. An estimated 83% of substances are metabolised by rats in a different way to humans.

14. Attempts to sue the manufacturers of the drug Surgam failed due to the testimony of medical experts that: 'data from animals could not be extrapolated safely to patients'.

15. Lemon juice is a deadly poison, but arsenic, hemlock and botulin are safe according to animal tests.

16. Genetically modified animals are not models for human illness. The mdx mouse is supposed to represent muscular dystrophy, but the muscles regenerate without treatment.

17. 88% of stillbirths are caused by drugs which are passed as being safe in animal tests, according to a study in Germany.

18. 61% of birth defects are caused by drugs passed safe in animal tests, according to the same study. Defect rates are 200 times post war levels.

19. One in six patients in hospital are there because of a treatment they have taken.

20. In America, 100,000 deaths a year are attributed to medical treatment. In one year 1.5 million people were hospitalised by medical treatment.

21. A World Health Organisation study showed children were 14 times more likely to develop measles if they had been vaccinated.

22. 40% of patients suffer side effects as a result of prescription treatment.

23. Over 200,000 medicines have been released, most of which are now withdrawn. According to the World Health Organisation, only 240 are 'essential'.

24. A German doctors' congress concluded that 6% of fatal illnesses and 25% of organic illness are caused by medicines. All have been animal tested.

25. The lifesaving operation for ectopic pregnancies was delayed 40 years due to vivisection.

26. According to the Royal Commission into vivisection (1912), 'The discovery of anaesthetics owes nothing to experiments on animals'. The great Dr Hadwen noted that 'had animal experiments been relied upon...humanity would have been robbed of this great blessing of anaesthesia'. The vivisector Halsey described the discovery of Fluroxene as 'one of the most dramatic examples of misleading evidence from animal data'.

27. Aspirin fails animal tests, as does digitalis (a heart drug), cancer treatments, insulin (causes animal birth defects), penicillin and other safe medicines. They would have been banned if vivisection were heeded.

28. In the court case when the manufacturers of Thalidomide were being tried, they were acquitted after numerous experts agreed that animal tests could not be relied on for human medicine.

29. Blood transfusions were delayed 200 years by animal studies, corneal transplants were delayed 90 years.

30. Despite many Nobel prizes being awarded to vivisectors, only 45% agree that animal experiments are crucial.

31. At least 450 methods exist with which we can replace animal experiments.

32. At least thirty-three animals die in laboratories each second worldwide; in the UK, one every four seconds.

33. The Director of Research Defence Society, (which exists to defend vivisection) was asked if medical progress could have been achieved without animal use. His written reply was 'I am sure it could be'.


universecannon said:
Interesting study, don't have time to look into it more but i did notice this skimming it

"Let’s do some math. The Wistar rats used in the study, the author tells us, weighed 200 g, which seems about right for their age of 30-45 days postnatal. The average lifespan of a Wistar rat is about two to three years — let’s say 30 months. Every day for 21 days each rat received 1 mL of ayahuasca — a dose of 0.005 mL/g.

An average human weighs about 70 kg and lives for about 840 months. Twenty-one days in a rat’s lifespan of 30 months is roughly equivalent to 20 months — or a bit more than a year and a half — in a human’s lifespan. Using the author’s own figures, the average human dose of ayahuasca in a ceremonial context is 150 mL — a dose of 0.002 mL/g.

In other words, the human equivalent of what the rats were given would be to drink two and a half doses of ayahuasca every day for more than a year and a half. Such human consumption of ayahuasca would be unusual."

Universecannon

Much respect for your thorough analysis...

Usually when you see results of tests done on animals it is generally to push an agenda.


Much Peace and Understanding
 
also..isnt oxidative stress mediated via the NMDA sites?

Harmine and harmaline are NMDA antagonists and in theory should block some of this oxidative stress. Saying they are just maoi's so they produce oxidative stress is a bit overly generalized here I think..these things hit so many receptors.
 
jamie said:
also..isnt oxidative stress mediated via the NMDA sites?

not necessarily. these receptors are just one class of glutamate receptors

these things hit so many receptors.

exactly, and there are other excitatory receptor systems besides glutamate (such as serotonin, and acetylcholine). MDMA, for example, induces oxidative stress to serotonin receptors in the raphe nuclei. an NMDA antagonist would do nothing to block this
 
There are also studies that indicate that harmala´s have neuroprotective properties. I don´t see why both couldn´t be true at the same time. If a substance can trigger different mechanisms simultaneously, there is no reason to automatically assume that all of these different mechanisms should all by definition be synergistic or have the same net result.

There is this 'two glasses of wine a day' theory that says that two glasses of wine each day is good for you. That, in no way, contradicts that 20 glasses of wine a day is bad for you.
 
I completely agree wtih benzyme on this.

Small doses on occasion are probably OK or even good for you.

But MAO is there to block non biogenic amines from entering the body and causing damage to the brain.

haramalas and DMT are not neurotoxic, but a whole host of other primary amine compounds are and if you don't watch your diet perfectly then you get run into trouble doing this every single day.

But honestly...WHO the hell wants to do aya every day?
 
@ joedirt:
"But honestly...WHO the hell wants to do aya every day?"
Who would do aya everyday? maybe some apprentice ayahuasquero of some sorts, but harmalas everyday is common here though the dose are more to the range of 25mg to 100mg.
I've heard quite a few poeple on this forum who do dose harmalas in microdose to low dose everyday for some days or a month.

Hmm harmalas...
 
joedirt said:
I completely agree wtih benzyme on this.

Small doses on occasion are probably OK or even good for you.

But MAO is there to block non biogenic amines from entering the body and causing damage to the brain.

haramalas and DMT are not neurotoxic, but a whole host of other primary amine compounds are and if you don't watch your diet perfectly then you get run into trouble doing this every single day.

I am not sure that it is so intuitive to suggest that daily uptake of harmalas can be toxic. On the contrary, it is far more complicated. Harmalas are reversible inhibitors of MAO-A, which means that the MAO-A system can still function, at least to some extend. Is it good enough? or is it compromised to a dangerous degree? Could there be a negative feedback mechanism that upregulates MAOI-A activity in people that daily take harmalas? Amidst the complications of physiology and bodily responses, it is very difficult to jump into conclusions.

Also, do we have any hard data from the extreme scenario of, say, irreversible MAOI inhibition (as in antidepressants) and possible side effects? We already know about the tyramine restrictions re the latter, but are there more into it?

It also feels intuitive that continuous interference with normal physiology can be no good, but is that so? People can take caffeine on a daily basis, and they are fine, or at least not with detrimental side effects.
 
caffeine has a more specific role as an inhibitor of PDE-1, albeit it's also a substrate at CYP3A4. it's also observed that excessive action of the former may result in cardiac arrest; it would also be reasonable to deduce that excitotoxicity would also occur.
as far as irreversible MAOIs, Nardil comes to mind. one would seriously need to watch one's regimen and diet while taking that. being that harmine/harmaline are RIMA's, it would be less of an issue, but of course, it's dose-dependent. it's a fair assumption that oxidative stress may occur with frequent moderate to high doses. frequent 'microdoses' is probably no big deal
 
If you would take antioxidants with ayahuasca, could that maybe neutralise these possible neurotoxic effects? ( I believe that acacia confusa is rich in antioxidants, btw )
 
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