I’m non-diabetic but am wearing a CGM to gather glucose data before and after starting rapamycin since I heard it can affect your glucose levels.
And it did - I was shocked as I read it only causes glucose spikes if you take too high a dose and start inhibiting mTORc2 but I’d only taken 2mgs!
Today, I ate a relatively carb-heavy lunch and spiked up to 169mg/dl before coming back down to the low-mid 100s two hours after the meal. I also did about 15 minutes of intensive exercise to help it come down faster, which is what I did the prior days too. This meal/post-meal curve matches the curves from the prior 2 days of CGM data.
30 minutes after my glucose had returned to the mid 100s, I took 2mg of rapamycin for the first time and was sedentary at the computer.
45 minutes later, I looked over at my phone and noticed my glucose levels had come up to 141mg/dl! That was a shock and did not happen the prior 2 days I’ve been wearing the CGM.
I did 10 minutes of resistance exercises (curls, squats, and pushups) and my levels started coming back down. As of this writing it’s down to 80mg/dl.
80mg/dl is also interesting because I never come back down to the 80s (let alone low 80s) this soon after a meal. According to my baseline data, I remain in the mid 100s for ~6-7 hours after a meal before coming back down to my normal fasting range of high 80s - mid 90s.
I also feel kind of dizzy, probably because my body isn’t used to being in the low 80s, though it’s slowly creeping back up towards 90 now. It’s been 4 hours since I’ve eaten.
Just sharing my n=1. Will update this thread as I continue my experiment.
Edit- 20 minutes after sending this and stopping exercising, my glucose is at 118 and trending up - above the range I’d expect it to be post-meal. This is definitely an effect of the rapamycin. Has anybody wearing a CGM seen this too? I’m shocked at the acute effect just 2 mgs has on my glucose.
Very interesting and thanks for sharing. Do you plan on continuing to take rapamycin weekly? I wonder if your body will adjust with time or not. 2mg is a low dose for humans from what I understand.
Hi @wrap-a-mice-in , can you share a little about your health profile? Any idea what your BMI is, or body fat %? How frequently (on average) do you exercise per week (for how long)?
Are you taking any other medications or supplements?
I’m a male in my early 30s with a BMI of 20. I have not done a dexa and am not taking any medications. Only supplement is 1g berberine (which doesn’t seem to do anything but I’m just going through the bottle) and a multi-vitamin.
I exercise at a medium-high intensity for 10-20 minutes every single day as part of a routine with an elderly family member.
I supplement that with high intensity for 20-30 minutes by myself ~4-5 times a day. I also walk 2-3 miles a week.
At last blood draw, my fasting glucose was 93 mg/dl and hba1c went up from 5.5% to 5.6% which I attributed to high intensity workouts and genetics. Everybody in my family has >5% hba1c’s and I have the rs560887(G;G) gene variant which makes my fasting glucose a bit higher than the average person.
Update since my OP: My baseline glucose has beyond a doubt increased from where it would’ve been had I not taken the rapamycin. It’s currently in the 110s while at this time yesterday and the day before, it’d be in the mid 90s.
One thing I have noticed is my glucose levels respond more to exercise than before. Before, when I did high intensity exercise my glucose would drop 5-10 mg/dl. Now, I can reproducibly bring it down 20-30 mg/dl from the 110s to low-mid 80s doing the same exercises. Very interesting.
Update 2: It’s now gone up to 136 mg/dl again after ~20 minutes of being sedentary - I took a shower and wrote this post. I’m going to exercise again to bring it back down. It feels like I’m constantly fighting my glucose since taking the rapamycin. Will report back what it drops down to after I work out.
Update 3:
My CGM updates every 5 minutes so these numbers are in 5 minute increments:
110 mg/dl → 136 mg/dl - At last update
136 mg/dl - Did 5 minutes of cardio and it seems to have halted the increase
131 mg/dl - Did 5 minutes of resistance and laid down to catch my breath and rest
119 mg/dl - Still resting
102 mg/dl - Got up to type this update.
81 mg/dl - Another massive drop 5 minutes later. Whoa.
85 mg/dl - Coming back up. Still resting.
93 mg/dl
102 mg/dl
114 mg/dl - Still resting. It’s marching up again. At this time 1-2 days ago I should be in the 90s.
I’ve never seen my glucose levels drop this much from exercising before. I keep getting meal-like spikes since taking rapamycin but they’re very responsive to exercise, unlike real meal spikes.
I would be curious to see your post-meal insulin level (ie: non fasting) with rapamycin compared to without rapamycin.
I believe that at least in some people, rapa can inhibit insulin secretion. This could account for the glucose spikes.
But, hey, what would I know; I’m not an MD.
Since the last update, it went up to 125 then slowly went down over the next hour. It’s now hovering in the high 100s.
Surprisingly, exercise has no effect on it anymore despite doing the exact same routine I did earlier that dropped my glucose from 136 to 81 in 20 minutes. Anyone have any ideas for why that might be?
This reminds me of my post-prandial levels of ~100 where exercising would have minimal effect in reducing it. It’d only drop to the 90s again ~6-7 hours after the meal. As of this post, it has been 8 hours and 22 minutes since I took 2mg of rapamycin and roughly 9 hours since my carb-heavy meal.
@Angel_Myers - Yea though I may drop to 1mg next week and compare results. @DrT - I’d be interested too but all I have is a CGM. I read a Blagosklonny paper that calls this rapamyin induced pseudo-diabetes similar to starvation diabetes where inhibiting mTOR makes your body think you’re fasting which causes the liver to release glucose. Dunno if that’s what’s happening here.
Is this the first time using a CGM or tracking blood sugar?
I just ask because when I first started using a CGM I spoke with a friend who has diabetes. I was using the FreeStyle libra at that point, and he told me that these measures can be wildly off-base from reality, and are really only valuable at a “directional” level. One way to calibrate to see how far its off is to buy a good finger prick system like this, and check in the morning when you get up with both your CGM and the finger prick to see how far off they are:
I use the librelink and its always about 10 to 20 points low compared to my finger prick results.
I use this for my finger prick measurements:
It’s my first time but I’m aware of calibration issues and I confirmed that my Dexcom g6 (couldn’t get a g7) is calibrated with a finger prick, yes, though not today. I tested it yesterday and the CGM was within 10 of the prick.
But even if the numbers were wrong, my levels still - seemingly randomly - went directionally up despite no meals and then directionally down after exercise in a way that its never done before post-meal.
Yes. @wrap-a-mice-in - lowering the IGF-1 / Insulin axis is probably a good part of the longevity effect (as long as you can still find ways to manage the glucose)
You can read elsewhere on the forum how glucose modulating drugs seems to work very well on combination with rapa in the ITP and bases on mechanistic reasons
Each or some combination of acarbose / Canaflozin (or perhaps other SGLTi) / metformin can help with that
acarbose, it seems can also help increase mTORC2
metformin might help avoid rebound (at higher rapa dosages)
(and they each appear to have other valuable potential).
Not saying you should take them all, but using one or two then, at least around rapa dosing might be something to consider
Even with a G7 or Libre 3, I would not believe there is any reliable data signal from two or three meals on one day
Rather would probably want to compare days and ideally many days, to be able to catch a signal in the noise
—
If this was your first time taking rapa you might have had other psychological to physical effects going on some excitement mixed with a bit of anxiety could easily drive a bit more cortisol and/or perhaps lower quality sleep yesterday - both with could impact your glucose reaction today
A lot of people have morning glucose rises or even spikes (part of cortisol release occurring with circadian clock).
So since you want levels to be in steady state to calibrate (blood glucose changes faster / ahead of the levels in the interstitial space that the CGM reads from), it might be better to calibrate at another time when you think things will be as stable as possible - hours after a meal/exercise, so perhaps just before lunch or dinner or just before bed
(And of course even the finger prick test have some error of measurement)
I wasn’t particularly excited or nervous. I had actually forgotten I took it until I saw the increase on my phone and it took a second to click that it might be due to the rapamycin. If anything I was more anxious afterwards seeing the spikes that kept coming throughout the day. But let’s say the initial reaction to the spike caused more spikes due to cortisol. I tested that by exercising to exhaustion the first day I put on the CGM. I saw a 16 mg/dl increase that slowly came down. Today, I saw a 50+ increase multiple times, and each increase was very responsive to exercise in a way post-meal increases are not.
I tested my g6 against a finger prick yesterday and it seemed to be within reason. Could be wrong but the trends I saw matched what I was physically doing. Eating, exercising, sleeping, etc.
The only time an increase didn’t coincide with a meal was when I took the rapamycin today.
Yes I’m just a n=1 but it would be an interesting coincidence for sure that the moment I take rapamycin is the moment my CGM starts producing bad data despite being in-line with prior days beforehand.
But even if we ignore the numbers and look at the trends, I still spiked randomly multiple times throughout the day and those spikes were very responsive to exercise in a way “normal” spikes aren’t. I don’t know what the cause is; more curious and hoping someone smarter than me can come up with a hypothesis.
I have worn a CGM three times—twice after starting rapamycin. I find that meal-induced CGM spikes are crushed by exercise. Powerlifting has weird effects, often increasing the glucose measurement, but a brisk walk will bring it way down.
I agree that it is interesting and that you can use that to form hypotheses and triangulate with knowledge and mechanistic understanding
The point is that for this to actually be an N=1 you now have to repeat it to build the data sample (N=1 does not mean hardly any data, rather to do it well it means MORE data, since you do not have external controls or large numbers of participants).
You could eg redo the same next week and try to have things as similar as possible the days before taking rapa and the rapa day and compare
You could do it with same dose if you quicker want to build sample size or you could change the dose to see if there is a dose response effect (if actually there is one) in you with rapa (but that will then require a larger sample size)
Yea for sure, I plan on updating this thread with more data and observations as I go. I have a month supply of CGMs and 5 months of rapamycin @ 2mg/week.
Debating on whether I should do 1mg or 2mg next week though since these spikes were unsettling.
Another way is to increase your predictive power is to increase the data types and go do blood tests before and then after rapa
You could eg get some insulin measurements or if you really want to understand this do a OGTT over 2-3h (test discussed on forum, just use the search function)
I had a metabolic panel done last week to establish a baseline though it didn’t include insulin. I have my next test scheduled roughly 6 weeks from now. I got the CGM to get higher resolution data instead of waiting 6 weeks for the next test, albeit only reading spot glucose.
Same thing happens to me. Surprised, so many here will search for reasons it isn’t the rapamycin. Occam’s razor everyone. It’s the Rapa. On Rapa I’m essentially a type 1 diabetic for 30 days. Fasting glucose on a basically carb free diet goes 80 to 100-120. Post prandial spikes if I eat any carbs hit ~150. Exercise lowers it a bit but not anywhere near when I’m not on Rapa. Insulin and c-peptide remain low despite the elevated glucose. All of this from a single 4-6mg dose. Once it wears off I’m incredibly insulin sensitive with excellent blood sugar but not sure if Rapa is making it any better than my baseline. I was going to make a separate post to discuss but figured I’d add here.
Question is, is it harmful, neutral, or beneficial? The mouse study that shows islet cell necrosis is always concerning. There’s a difference between decreasing insulin secretion and actually causing necrosis of your islet cells. The diabetogenic effect of rapamycin needs to be considered when dosing for longevity.
