Many of those on this site respect the work of Dr. Matt Kaeberlein… one of the foremost authorities on rapamycin research.
Here with Peter Attia, Matt discusses his use of rapamycin for 8 weeks that created physiological changes. And, it was not placebo.
Go to 1: 27 :10
Yes, and Matt himself says, 'the placebo effect is very real… ’
I’m not saying that rapamycin doesn’t have these beneficial effects, I’m saying that without DATA it’s just anecdote and therefore worthless from a scientific perspective.
The parabiosis clinical trial sounds interesting! Can you share any details?
Yup! I started at 1mg and am increasing by 1mg every week. I’ll probably keep it at 10mg long-term, if only because the medication comes in packs of 10. But I’m open to changing the dosage if I see good advice/data in this forum!
Let’s not exaggerate. No one has said any such thing about their dog. I wrote about the glasses and I’m sorry you disapprove.
For those who are intellectually curious and not inclined to dismiss people’s first hand accounts out of hand, I had not needed reading glasses for 20 years since grad school when last year, around age 47, I began to need the glasses to read my phone.
I used them for 6-8 months when I began rapamycin. Since then I have stopped using the glasses and stopped needing them.
Placebo? Maybe. Coincidence? Perhaps. I’m certainly making no claims about causation, because how can you know?
What I know is that I needed reading glasses and now I don’t. That’s the data.
For the record, a persistent shoulder pain (3 years) disappeared in my 2nd to 3rd week of rapamycin, when I’d started with 1mg and took 2mg on week two. The shoulder never hurts now. More data.
Lots of info in this thread: Plasmapheresis Startup Looking for Clinical Trial Participants SF Bay Area
Its all been pretty uneventful so far. I’ve gone in for 4 parabiosis sessions so far, two more to go next month. You go in, lie down, they put the large needles with hoses into your arm veins (one on each arm, one taking out, one putting back in), and you sit there for three hours while the equipment does its work. I bring my headset and prepare my podcasts, and audio books and to entertain myself.
They actually put a good amount of effort into blinding the participants from knowing whether they are getting the actual treatment or a sham treatment (they have a control group). There is a curtain barrier between the patient and the equipment, and the blood hoses are covered in a black wrapping to hide whether blood is moving through the hoses, and they cover your arms with towels too.
To be honest, I’ve not noticed much difference in anything. I haven’t done any bloodwork, etc. since starting because I want to remain unbiased (I’m assuming that I would notice some changes in my blood work and biological age if I was getting the treatment). But so far, my guess is that I’m on the control arm of the study just because I’m not feeling any difference. They do some basic functional testing - grip strength, balance, etc. every time I go in , and not much difference so far.
I’m totally with @Maveric78 on this - we really want to try to get good data on everyone’s outcomes here. Ideally measures from devices that take the human error element out of the equation.
I mean ideally we really want large, placebo controlled clinical studies of rapamycin… but that doesn’t seem likely anytime soon, so the next best thing is aggregated data from people on this forum. The more data the better. Fitbit measures, lab measures, Optometry measures, etc. Please - if you can gather pre and post data on any biological or functional measure, I encourage you to do it.
That said, I’m also interested in subjective measures too. In fact the FDA has had a major initiative that moves in this direction too, an area called “Patient Reported Outcomes” - and they put a lot of weight on this now.
My point is simply we want both. Right now I think we’re probably weaker on the hardcore data, so I encourage people to do pre and post testing (as much as possible, as many parameters as possible) and post the data here.
Details here on the FDA’s move towards PROs: Focus Area: Patient-Reported Outcomes and other Clinical Outcome Assessments | FDA
I don’t know for sure but I think that it may be the case that part of the reason why placebos seem to have an effect is that people may be making other changes in addition to taking the placebo and the other changes are actually causing the effect. This would mean that the effect of placebos is not purely psychological.
My dog was noticeably better the day after his first dose (1/9/23) to the point of convincing my skeptical husband to consider taking rapamycin for himself. My dog has maintained his initial improvements and although his first dose was the most dramatic change he has continued to become about 10% more mobile with each passing week. I didn’t share this with any exaggeration or thoughts of misleading anyone. I’m fully aware it’s anecdotal but don’t think it can be placebo with both of us noticing the same changes in our dog. I apologize if people found my report far fetched. His change seemed really rapid for us as well and I would have never believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.
I find your dog report very consistent with what others with older dogs have been saying on here.
That almost immediately vision, alertness, hearing, sense of smell, and better mobility return… realizing dogs age so much faster probably the effects of healing with rapamycin in their systems is faster too.
Happy to learn these loyal companions are getting a last youthful spurt of life.
I think this type of report is great. But I’m also wondering how we can improve on it and get some data. I’m going to be giving some rapamycin to friends to try with their dogs and I’m wondering how best to try to quantify the results (pre and post).
I’m thinking that the increase and energy would be quite well measured by some sort of doggy fitness tracker - what do you think?
Ideally I’m thinking we’d put the track on the dog a few weeks prior to initiating rapamycin to get a baseline of activity, sleep, etc…
Any other ideas out there on how to get data from these dog rapamycin trials?
Today Michael Lustgarten, Ph.D., discussed albumen as the most important marker on the various age tests.
Since taking rapamycin for over a year my levels have increased from 40 to 43 and seem to be trending upward. This is the first biomarker in which I have seen improvement since taking rapamycin.
“Of 41 biomarkers included in Aging.ai’s platform, serum albumin has the greatest relative importance.”
A doggie fitness tracker would have picked up the dramatic improvement that my dog experienced almost immediately upon taking Rapamycin.
She had been parked on the couch for perhaps 90% of the day beforehand.
After dosage she was up and moving, lying on the couch perhaps 60% of the day. She was more social with us, more hungry, and more playful with other dogs.
Like the poster said above, it was a surprising and immediate change.
We have another dog that will be 3 at the end of April. My husband mentioned starting her on it at some point but I think right now might be a tad too soon? I will definitely get a tracker for her and follow your suggestions before starting her on rapamycin though. Thanks!
The mouse rapamycin studies showed the greatest lifespan increases when they started the mice at 9 months (early adulthood), equivalent to 25 years or so in humans. So I started my dog at age 3 years on rapamycin, which is “roughly” the same age equivalence. No problems, but hard to identify benefits at this age also.
I haven’t done the doggy fitbit … but wish I had.
Blsm, how old was your dog that had the dramatic improvement? Sorry if it was mentioned before but I didn’t catch it.
I should have a full set of pre and post data by the end of this month to report (I’ll add it to the thread where I put all the pre data).
He’s between 14-16. We rescued him so don’t know his exact age.
No. It’s absolutely possible – and even likely – that a situation like that would be placebo.
What protocol do you use, sir?
