Hey John, mostly on this forum I’ve seen weekly dosing. Can you point me at anything that shares less frequent dosing being still effective? Would be great if it was
The challenge is one of evidence. I am currently working on a really high dose every 2 months. I think it works quite well, but am not that certain.
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medaura
#13
I used to take siroboon, 5mg, with grapefruit juice. Probably roughly equivalent to 5mg without grapefruit juice but with enteral coating. My husband takes 3-4mg, Pfizer, with grapefruit juice. Any dose above that gives him side effects. I plan to go back on Rapa when my baby is weaned and see if I can titrate up until I find my ceiling via side effects of any sort. At my old dose I just felt great and had perfect bloodwork.
I wonder … Rapa does slow down cell turnover. Perhaps that leads to clogged sebum ducts hence acne.
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Thank you! Appreciate this, mostly sounds positive and probably I’ll keep taking it for a while. Yesterday I took 3mg and I definitely noticed that my mouth felt weird, had some trouble sleeping and today I have a headache. I’m pretty small, and generally highly sensitive to meds. I might try 2 or 2.5 next week.
Do you know of any follow up to the young mice breast cancer exercise study? It seems somewhat relevant as my mom did have breast cancer (not genetic) - although, I’m more middle aged than young and I don’t currently have cancer.
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Currently I (38F) take 5mg Rapacan + GFJ (three fresh squeezed grapefruits) biweekly after dinner, so I suspect there is some EVOO as well. I have no side effects other than feeling tired but not in a bad way and needed more sleep in the ~3 days following dosing.
I started taking rapa about a year ago working my way up to 6mg weekly, but switched to biweekly because 1) if I’m going to be tired, better to be tired every other week than every week 2) the idea of taking a higher dose less frequently seems to make sense to me.
My LDL labs came back as slightly high, but my doctor was not concerned about it. I have not had any other side effects and can’t say I feel much different either which I think is about as well as one can be doing in the late 30s. I haven’t had any illnesses and generally feel pretty good. Regarding fertility I have taken continuous birth control since 31, initially yasmin and now nextstellis and do not plan on stopping.
I am considering adding an SGLT2i or acarbose but I am not yet sure how to determine which would be more appropriate and under what protocol. Maybe that should be its own post.
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Joyce
#16
After adjusting various dosages over the initial three months, I continued with 3 mg per week plus GFJ for almost two years.
About three or four months ago, after seeing everyone’s discussions on the forum and considering my acne, I started trying to reduce the dosage.
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Are you not concerned abt potential unknowns? Why start now vs at an older age when there will be more data and “less to loose” ?
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Mere life extension is a poor substitute for eternal youth. Eternal youth is what everyone from Alexander the Great to Ponce de León was seeking, not mere life extension. “Youth” being the key word.
So, for the young people on this forum, zealously seek out any means to preserve your youth. I have rethought my earlier suggestions about rapamycin. IMO, you should start low-dose rapamycin as early as possible because we have noticeable declines in our early thirties, actually as far as athletic abilities, even earlier.
Hopefully, we will soon have better biometric tests and aging clocks to guide us.
While life extension is better than nothing, it can never capture the pleasures of youth.
I was very fortunate to have had a wonderful and exciting youth. Bad times, too few to remember. If I could relive my years from 15 to 30, I would put it on continuous rewind,
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There are risks and rewards to starting rapamycin earlier than later. There is a discussion thread on the site focused on this: The Case for Starting Rapamycin Earlier in Life (e.g. late 20s) vs middle age (e.g. 50s)
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I would take the risks. The side effects of rapamycin, IMO, are easily mitigated.
Based on the current evidence, this is a no-brainer until something better comes along.
Rapamycin is just a place holder until something far better comes along.
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helenas
#21
the calculus is relatively simple for myself. While not a 1:1 analogy, the equities market makes it pretty visual. If you believe you found the next OpenAI or Nvidia, before they went exponential, would you wait for the public to come to a consensus that they are worth what they are worth? And then invest when the market cap is already extremely high? or would you get in early and get potential 100x upside, while having optionality to exit if the data starts to trend negatively? i’d rather live my life looking for 100x upsides with maybe 1x-2x downsides.
or framed another way: we can probably model what a probability distribution would look like for your life/age if you lived it according to how humans have lived for all of humanity. We have plenty of data for that. We have little data on the probability distribution for humans on rapamycin for a long period of their life. based on the current data, there is little reason to hypothesize that the distribution shifts to the left, but a lot more reason to hypothesize that the distribution might shift to the right. I’d bet on the latter hypothesis and act accordingly.
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Spoken like a true member of the financial industry. 
Yes, the risk/reward ratio is skewed heavily towards reward with Rapamycin. The downsides are limited and short-term. Just be careful for the black swans of bacterial infection, wound healing, and sunburn. 
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helenas
#23
more like true member of wallstreetbets
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So you’re a fringe member then.
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I understand there is a non-zero risk assumed when taking rapamycin but it seems directionally correct to take it to improve healthspan. Do I have some doubts about the dosage, which for me at 5mg biweekly + GFJ + EVOO may be a bit aggressive? Sure. I will follow up on my LDL and likely add statin / SGLT2i / acarbose upon more research. That opens the door for polypharmacy which is not without risk as well. Do I think it is a little weird that I haven’t encountered anyone in the wild that has even heard of rapamycin and that maybe what I am doing is quite fringe? It has crossed my mind.
At this point, I don’t see a reason to stop or reduce the dose since I have no side effects and my blood work is mostly fine. If I get an injury or a bacterial infection I will know to pause taking it.
As 30s women are ovaries are “at an older age” than the rest of our bodies already. The preliminary findings from the Colombia study are very promising.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/22/drug-women-fertility-study-rapamycin
What data would you like to see that would assuage your concerns?
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People would guess what I say on this. However, I will continue arguing my corner. I think Rapamycin is like encouraging a spring clean of the mitochondria. If someone is in their 20s or 30s, once a year might be enough (but a good sized dose at a time when not facing operations or infection risk).
The negative effect of Rapamycin is that it affects glucose processing and lipids (possibly on the back of tthe glucose), it undermines the immune system and reduces cell division.
Interestingly I think the increase in glucose levels is mainly from an increase in the baseline, not the peaks.
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@John_Hemming my limited experience in using a CGM while taking rapamycin (13 days in total with a single ~15mg dose) was that my glucose was more reactive (higher peaks), faster to reduce (strangely variable), and maintained a higher baseline. All of this effect disappeared within 12 hours (less actually). I’d say my glucose went crazy temporarily.
I wonder if your “higher base” is from your large dose taking a while to clear…?
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I think my longer lasting effects is because I took a higher dose. I want to wait until things have settled down before posting anything. My dose was initially higher and would last perhaps a week longer in total.
The previous dose which was equivalent to say about 50mg had calmed down before I took this dose, but I don’t have the glucose measurements to say when this calmed down.
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@acidburn I mean, ideally I would like to see a longitudinal study in more relevant / closely related species (humans or primates) that shows life extension and no increase in specific cancers. So the thought here is if we wait 10 years till we’re in our late 40’s, we may be able to see what the effects (positive and negative) have been on the cohort here
I think the marmoset study will be published sometime in the near future - and has shown about a 10% lifespan improvement: Insights from Prof. Adam Salmon by The Aging Science Podcast
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