After years of exposure to thundering explosions and gunshots, nearly every special operations veteran will return from military service with a traumatic brain injury (TBI). For many, those injuries result in lifelong psychological disorders and disability, and few treatment options exist to help.
Now, new research from the journal Nature Medicine suggests that ibogaine, a psychedelic drug made from the iboga shrub in central West Africa, may have potential to heal the long-lasting effects of TBI (1).
“Ibogaine is an exciting potential therapeutic option,” said Nolan Williams, an experimental therapeutics researcher at Stanford University and study coauthor.
Ibogaine has gained attention in recent years as evidence grows for its ability to treat substance use disorders, but its effects on TBI had not yet been explored. To see what the psychedelic drug could do, Williams followed thirty special operations veterans with TBI as they participated in an ibogaine retreat at a clinic in Mexico.
At the beginning of the study, nearly all of the veterans experienced severe psychiatric symptoms including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, insomnia, and rage. Approximately two-thirds of the participants reported feeling suicidal in their lifetimes, and many also suffered from disabilities that affected their cognition and mobility.
One month after their visits to the psychedelic retreat center and treatment with ibogaine, the veterans’ psychiatric symptoms had improved by approximately 80 percent. Cognitive tests also suggested that their TBI-induced disabilities had waned after the therapy.
“The results are remarkable,” said Martín Polanco, founder and research director of The Mission Within, a separate psychedelic therapy retreat center for veterans located in Tijuana. Polanco was not involved in this study.
Williams believes that ibogaine is effective because it encourages neuroplasticity and boosts levels of neurotrophic factors, meaning that it helps the brain grow and form new connections, possibly healing the cellular damage caused by TBI. Even mild TBI can trigger a cascade of impaired cellular signaling and cell death, leading to larger problems in brain function.
Polanco said that the subjective effects of ibogaine are especially conducive to healing psychological wounds. “The felt experience of ibogaine is that of being inside of a waking dream,” he said. “It brings up moments from your childhood or from your past that were emotionally significant, and that allows you to reevaluate them from a more emotionally detached perspective.”
The felt experience of ibogaine is that of being inside of a waking dream.
- Martín Polanco, The Mission Within
Polanco cautioned that ibogaine alone is not a silver bullet. Psychedelic therapy often requires days of preparation and debriefing, and taking ibogaine without those “bookends” can lead to an unsafe experience. The researchers at the clinic were also careful to administer magnesium in tandem with the ibogaine, preventing the dangerous cardiac dysfunction sometimes associated with the drug.
While these initial results are promising, both doctors admitted that the drug’s legal status will make future studies an uphill battle. Ibogaine is currently a Schedule I drug in the United States, meaning that it has no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. “The hope is that with this data, we’re able to go to the FDA and make a compelling case for subsequent study,” said Williams.
Despite the challenges ahead, Williams is confident that ibogaine could be a powerful tool in treating TBI and other neurological disorders, and he aims to conduct larger, more thorough studies on the drug in the future.
“We don’t have solutions for these problems,” he said. “The reason why people are looking at compounds like psychedelics is because our modern drug discovery processes haven’t solved all the problems.”
Reference
- Cherian, K. et al. Magnesium–ibogaine therapy in veterans with traumatic brain injuries. Nat Med 30, 373-381 (2024).
