I’ve wondered this as well and I’d never seen 5-HT reuptake inhibitors or MAOi drugs associated with VHD. Worth a deeper dive after reading the news release you linked @NotSure
This was an interesting paper for people with Parkinson’s disease. Mianserin was the only mental health medication that improved lifespan.
Which appears to be a mix of 5-HT antagonist, histamine antagonist, alpha antagonist, perhaps opioid agonist(kor?), and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor.
The survival effects they found in the general population for most of the drugs that showed benefit in PD (although not mianserin) were interesting as well. I take buproprion, which has NRI effects, so I found mianserin an interesting one. Buproprion is approved in Norway and shows up in the NorPD database that they combed, so I’m guessing it didn’t show a survival benefit.
The opioid/opium medications were surprising as well.
This was one very interesting/surprising! At least for ‘harder’ opiates I’d imagine the association would be inverted due to their use in chronic pain and terminal diseases. There’s also associations between opiate use and cancer, as well as mechanistic data showing that opiates modulate immune cell function, although I don’t think a causal link has ever been demonstrated.
I was very happy to see this data since I’ve been using 7-hydroxymitragynine daily for the past year and a half. It’s a pretty remarkable substance (weak partial mu agonism with arrestin-insensitivity) that doesn’t evoke respiratory depression like the opium-derived alkaloids and other classical opiates, but it’s still not something I’m thrilled about having used so much either.
From Wikipedia:
"Around this time, Shulgin began showing early signs of dementia, mostly severe loss of short-term memory. With progression of the dementia since 2010, his wife, Ann Shulgin, had been trying to sell part of their property to raise more money to cover care costs. "
Sasha was also exposed to a lifetime of organic solvents and other lab chemicals (he had a gung-ho attitude in this regard—not even a fume hood in his personal lab), didn’t watch his diet at all, and tended to drink and use stimulants as well. He went downhill really fast in his last few years and ironically, it was the heart valve surgery which seemed to precipitate that. He just never really recovered from it.
Altogether though he made it to 88, which is pretty damn good considering his wide exposure to xenobiotics. His wife Ann made it to 91 and Darrell Lemaire (another guy who ran around in Sasha’s group) made it to 92, so they’re definitely great anecdotal examples of psychedelic use and longevity.
