Whilst on my last Rapa break I developed a frozen shoulder.
Searching the site I found the link to a Matt Kaberlein interview where he said he did 8mg a week for 10 weeks and it went away.
Am going to do this - will be interesting if I make it an n=2.
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Let us know what happens.
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Great! Let us know how it goes. I had frozen shoulder a few years ago, I did PT for a few months, seemed to help, but I never got back to 100% - I still have a slight range of motion limitation… doesn’t really affect me in a practical sense, other than when I lift my arm straight up under the shower to soap up my armpit; the frozen shoulder one has like maybe 5% less range of motion, so instead of getting it straight up 90 degrees, it’s at 85 degrees or so.
I’m curious to see if rapa will affect this, when I start taking it sometime in the middle of next year 
So what happened with the FS last Aug?
Quite timely that you ask as it’s 90% cured (I was going to wait until 100% before reporting back but since you ask…)
So I did the Matt Kaeberlein protocol of 8mg per week for 12 weeks with all the exercises that I learned to do from when I’d previously had frozen shoulder on the other side a decade earlier that got so bad it required surgery.
After two weeks the deterioration stopped (deteriorating pain free movement was noticeable every few days before starting the Rapamycin treatment) but nothing really changed either way for another 5 or 6 weeks. Then I started to notice a very gradual improvement with a greater range of pain free motion.
By the time the 12 weeks was up I estimate that around 50% of the range of movement was now pain free.
Have been on my usual Rapa break since then but continued with all the exercises. So we are about 8-9 weeks further on and I’m at a level of 90-95% of movement pain free.
My conclusion is the Rapamycin halts the deterioration in its tracks. It will stop the shoulder from becoming completely frozen. All the various exercises are what restores the full pain free movement.
I think we can safely say we have an N=2 (@mkaeberlein and I) for Rapamycin as a therapeutic agent for prevention and cure of frozen shoulders when combined with the relevant exercises.
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Thanks for the datapoint!
It’s tough because FS spontaneously improves after random amounts of time. Each case seems to be different. I suspect FS is prob triggered by injury and the inflammation is part of the natural repair process after tissue damage but that in some people the area around the joint gets stuck in pro-inflammatory signalling, possibly due to systemic factors that maybe are related to high systemic mTOR signalling, which is not uncommon in today’s high protein overall-too-many-calories consumed diets. Unsurprising rapa would help with that, but I suspect not a miracle cure eg may not be helpful while initial tissue injury still healing and may not be as helpful for people who are very lean and/or eat low protein and thus have low mTOR levels to start with.
Probably need an RCT, but FS would be hard to recruit for I would think and who is going to pay for a rapa trial. Same as difficulty funding a trial of it for aging but worse due to fewer sufferers of the condition making recruiting and duration of study longer.
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Welcome to the forum Karl, its good to see you here.
Karl started and maintains the best website focused on the Longevity Biotech market: https://agingbiotech.info and is very active in the longevity community more broadly.
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A new paper that “may” touch upon the mechanism of action in the “frozen shoulder” cases:
Rapamycin ameliorates inflammatory pain via recovery of autophagy flux mediated by mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling pathway in the rat spinal cord
Results: We found that the paw withdrawal threshold and paw withdrawal latency were both significantly decreased after CFA (Complete Freund’s Adjuvant) injection, accompanied by the activation of mTOR signaling pathway and the inhibited autophagy flux in the spinal cord. And inflammatory cytokines were increased in the spinal cord after CFA injection. Then, we studied the effect of rapamycin on CFA-induced inflammatory pain in rats, and found that rapamycin restored the autophagy flux and significantly reduced mechanical allodynia and thermal hyperalgesia. In addition, rapamycin significantly decreased the levels of TNF-α, IL-1β, and IL-6 after CFA injection in the spinal cord.
Conclusion: Our results suggested that rapamycin might be a promising candidate for the treatment of inflammatory pain by restoring the autophagy flux in the spinal cord.
Frozen shoulder resolves on its own and even faster with rehabilitation. So it took you 5 months to get to 90% with exercise. For reference after triamcinolone acetate 80 mg intra-articular injection I was 80% better in 2 weeks.
I would say it’s hard to draw conclusions from your n=1.
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I agree, that when I had the injection in the other shoulder it resolved in around 6 weeks, however from a cost point of view this way was much cheaper.
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I agree with what you are saying and obviously an RCT is required, though given the trajectory of deterioration was the same for both shoulders (and the first one continued all the way to the point of zero movement in any direction without pain) I could say that I was my own crossover trial.
All we need now is another million people to join this conversation of which there might be sufficient numbers who’ve already had a frozen shoulder treated with an injection and the subsequently find the other side freezing up and they try the Rapa approach, and you might eventually get a statistically significant number of outcomes.
Thinking about this, is an RCT even possible as you are either injecting with saline or nothing at all. The shoulder is unfrozen immediately with the injection so it can’t be blinded.
Anyway for those who don’t want the cost of seeing a consultant if not covered by insurance this is an alternative option in my opinion. ( Though one would need to know what exercises to do!!)
Thanks for your interest.
BTW, did you get a frozen shoulder while taking weekly rapamycin or during your break ?
During my break.
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and your previous frozen shoulder ?
A decade ago, long before I knew anything about Rapamycin.
So you are still planning to implement the breaks ?
I take a break during the winter months from mid December to end of February as my two kids are always bringing viruses home from school, and I have a shorter break in the summer when I am travelling.
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To finally close off this thread I now have 100% pain free movement in all directions.
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What’s the total time from the beginning to completely resolving it? A friend of mine, a physical therapist, told me that it takes not less than 6 months to heal regardless of methods. Even if you don’t do anything, it will resolve in 6 mo or so.
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