Lion's Mane Mushroom: Clinical Research, Extract Types, and Industry Innovation

[muscleupcrohn]

I know this is an old post, but since the nootropic subforum isn’t always super active, I figured I’d add to this discussion a bit.

Both of the human studies, which we know used 2-3g/day, used the fruiting body powder, not the mycelium. Now, that’s not to say that the mycelim won’t work, or isn’t effective, but we don’t really have human studies on it, so if you want to replicate the human studies the most closely, I’d suggest using fruiting body powder.

Also, I had a bit of a discussion with Host Defense regarding mycelium vs fruiting bodies. Here’s some excerpts:

From Host Defense:

There are a few different types of compounds only found in Lion’s Mane that make it unique–Hericenones and Erinacines are the two major categories. Hericenones are typically found in the fruiting bodies while erinacines are derived from the mycelium of the mushroom. Both may be found in each part of the mushroom–and this may be why fruiting bodies have been found to be effective. However, when the components were isolated and tested on rats, the hericenones did not show any NGF gene expression, while 8 out of 15 known erinacines were shown to be active. Due to the higher concentrations of erinacines in mycelium, we believe that mushroom mycelium is at least (if not more) effective as fruitbodies.

From Me:

given that erinacines were able to stimulate NGF synthesis, even if hericenones are not, I see some research showing (in rodent cells anyway), that they (hericenones) did potentiate NGF-induced neuritogenesis in the presence of NGF (making low doses of NGF have comparable effects to higher doses). Could perhaps mean that, even if the erinacines are the “active” compounds in lion’s mane, and are more present in the mycellum, a higher presence of hericenones in the fruiting body may make the lower amounts of the active erinacines more effective, provdiding similar or even potentially greater effects relative to the mycellum that has more of the active erinacines, but less hericenones to potentiate them? I suppose without knowing how much of each there are in both, and also having more than in vitro and rodent studies, nothing will be absolutely certain here though.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25288148/[/quote]

Me again:

I actually just found a third study (in addition to the two aforementioned studies that used fruiting body powder) that used 80% bulk mycelia and 20% fruiting body extract and found that it decreased depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. The dose used was 1200mg/day of bulk mycelia and 300mg/day of fruiting body extract. The mycelia had >37% Polysaccharides/total glucans, and the fruiting body extract had >45%.

Edit: it may be worth noting that this study had no placebo group though, while the two studies that used the fruiting body powder did.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6500611/[/quote]

Host Defense:

Not off-base at all, and these are reasons why we support more scientific study. Indeed, the human clinical trials are few and of small cohorts. However, the preliminary data along with the human research strongly supports its use for cognitive functioning, memory, mood as well as peripheral neurological functioning.* The exact details of amounts to use and the exact boundaries of most effective outcomes are definitely areas of needed research…