Reishi vs melatonin: what a new sleep study found (2026)
An 8.7 point drop on the Insomnia Severity Index after eight weeks. That was the average for adults taking Reishi extract every night in a trial presented at SLEEP 2026 in June. The group taking melatonin dropped 5.6 points over the same stretch.
A three point gap on a 28 point scale sounds small written down. On this index, a change of six or more is usually counted as meaningful to the person living with it, so both groups improved, and the Reishi group improved further. That is why the result travelled.
What the study looked at
The trial was run by Dr Ching Xie at Brooklyn Unity Medical Care in New York and presented as a late breaking abstract at SLEEP 2026, the yearly meeting of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.
- 218 adults with chronic insomnia signed up between December 2025 and February 2026, and 209 finished.
- Half took 980mg of Reishi extract each night, standardised to 6% triterpenes. The other half took 5mg of melatonin.
- Both groups kept it up for 8 weeks.
- The main measure was the Insomnia Severity Index, a seven question score covering how long it takes to fall asleep, waking in the night, waking too early, and how much poor sleep gets in the way of the day.
| Reishi extract | Melatonin | |
|---|---|---|
| Nightly amount | 980mg (6% triterpenes) | 5mg |
| Average fall in ISI score | 8.7 points | 5.6 points |
| Difference between groups | 3.1 points in favour of Reishi (95% confidence interval 2.0 to 4.2) | |
| Serious side effects | None reported in either group | |
The gap held after the researchers adjusted for age, sex and how bad people's insomnia was at the start.
Why melatonin was a bold choice of comparison
Most supplement trials measure an extract against a dummy pill. This one put Reishi up against melatonin, which is a licensed sleep medicine in the UK for adults over 55 and is sold freely in the US. Beating a placebo tells you something works a bit. Holding its own against an active treatment is a harder test.
It is also worth knowing that 5mg is a fairly high dose of melatonin. UK prescriptions for adults usually start at 2mg. A lower dose taken earlier in the evening might have done better. This trial can't tell us.
Promising, and still early.
We have been careful with this study on our own pages, and here is why.
It has only been presented as a conference abstract. Abstracts are short summaries that haven't been through full peer review, so outside experts haven't yet picked over the method, the statistics or how people were chosen. Plenty of abstracts change once the full paper is written. Some never become papers at all.
We also don't know whether people knew which pill they were taking. Reishi and melatonin capsules can look and taste different, and insomnia scores are self reported, so blinding matters a lot here. The summaries published so far don't say.
Eight weeks is short, too. Insomnia is often a problem measured in years, and a treatment that works in month two needs to keep working in month twelve.
Then there's the question we'd most like answered and can't. The trial used one specific extract at one specific amount. Reishi products vary hugely. Some are whole mushroom powder, some are extracts, and the amount of triterpenes varies a lot from one to the next. Whether the result carries over to other Reishi products is completely open.
Where the rest of the Reishi research sits
Before this trial, most of the sleep evidence for Reishi came from animals. A 2012 study in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology found that rats given a high dose of Reishi extract slept 97% longer in total, mostly through extra non REM sleep. Results in rats often fail to carry over to people, which is why the new human trial got so much attention.
Reishi also has a very long history of use. In China it is called lingzhi and it has been taken as a calming tonic for more than 2,000 years. That history tells you people valued it. It can't tell you how well it works.
How this relates to Starshroooms
Starshroooms contains Reishi as a 20:1 extract, which means 20kg of dried Reishi goes into every 1kg of extract. It sits alongside five other mushrooms, Panax Ginseng and Vitamin B5. The trial didn't test Starshroooms, and the amount of Reishi in two gummies is different from the 980mg used in the study, so we don't claim the result for our product.
What we can say is that Vitamin B5 contributes to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue. That is an authorised health claim in the UK, and it's the only one we make for Starshroooms.
If you have had trouble sleeping for more than three months, speak to your GP. Chronic insomnia is treatable, and the treatment with the strongest evidence is cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, which NICE recommends as the first treatment.
We'll update this article when the full paper is published.
