Best Mushrooms for Brain Health

Thirty adults aged 50 to 80 took 3 g a day of powdered Hericium erinaceus or placebo for sixteen weeks. Cognitive scores climbed steadily in the mushroom group and not in the placebo group. Four weeks after they stopped, the gain drifted back, which is the clearest possible sign that the mushroom itself was driving the change.

A double-blind trial in healthy young adults. A single dose produced faster performance on a processing-speed task, and after 28 days of daily use participants reported feeling less stressed. An encouraging early result, and the reason larger trials are now being called for.

A review of the mechanism research, and one of the more interesting stories in mycology. It separates the two compound families by where they form: hericenones in the fruiting body, erinacines in cultured mycelium. This review states that erinacine A is absent from fruiting bodies altogether. Both families are associated with nerve growth factor activity in cell and animal models, and that work is preclinical; the human cognition trials used fruiting-body preparations. Laboratory work has mapped a plausible route, which is exactly why the human trials are worth running.

Forty-seven healthy Japanese adults aged 60 and over ate bread containing 50 g of maitake daily for eighteen weeks, in three arms. One of the two strains tested, Y10M, improved scores on the Japanese version of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment against placebo; the other, C5304, did not. Natural killer cell activity rose in the Y10M group and tracked the cognitive score. Read it for what it tested: 50 g of whole mushroom baked into food, not a 10:1 extract, and a result that held for one strain out of two.

Trained cyclists took Cs-4 for five weeks with no change to VO2peak or time-trial performance. Worth reading for the species: Cs-4 is Cordyceps sinensis, the wild caterpillar fungus, which is a different mushroom from the farmed Cordyceps militaris sold here and the one the positive exercise research was run on.

Three weeks of daily supplementation was associated with a longer time to exhaustion, a higher ventilatory threshold and a higher VO2max; after one week, only time to exhaustion had improved. Read it for what it tested: the supplement was PeakO2, a six-species blend of mycelial biomass grown on oats, so nothing here is attributable to Cordyceps alone, and the three-week result comes from the 10 of 28 participants who continued that far. An encouraging early signal in a field that deserves a bigger trial.

A survey of the human research on Cordyceps militaris in exercise and recovery. It gathers the positive findings so far and calls for larger trials on consistently characterised preparations, which is the natural next step for an area attracting this much interest.

The widest survey of the Reishi literature: 17 clinical trials covering 971 participants, at doses from 200 to 11,200 mg a day. Pooled analysis found significant improvements in BMI, serum creatinine, glutathione peroxidase and resting heart rate. Many other markers did not move, and the reviewers rate the certainty of the underlying trials as low and call for better-designed studies, which is the usual state of a field this active and this young.

A pilot trial in 48 patients undergoing endocrine therapy reported improved fatigue and physical wellbeing scores using Reishi spore powder. A different preparation from a fruiting body extract and a clinical setting, and an encouraging signal from a mushroom taken for exactly this reason for centuries.

The trial that matches a fruiting body product most closely. Thirty-one cognitively healthy adults over 50 took 3.2 g a day of powdered Hericium erinaceus fruiting body or placebo for twelve weeks, with compliance above 98%. Scores on the Mini Mental State Examination rose significantly against placebo. Two other cognitive tests were unchanged, which is a fair description of an early and promising field.

Seventy-five adults with subjective memory complaints took Tremella fuciformis at 600 or 1200 mg a day, or placebo, for eight weeks in a double-blind trial. Memory complaint scores improved against placebo, with significant gains in short-term memory and executive function, and exploratory brain scans showed changes in several regions. Side effects were no different from placebo.