I was taking .25 mg of finasteride but had to stop. It literally made my testicles hurt. It was a dull but medium-intensity pain that wouldn’t go away until I stopped taking finasteride. Everyone’s biology is different!
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Exactly… maybe try Pumpkin seed oil?
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Weekly Update: 6mg
Ten days ago I upped my dose to 6mg at a 10-day cycle. I’m happy to say I felt great all 10 days! No mouth sores, headaches, or anything else negative to speak of. Next week I see my dentist. I’m curious to hear his thoughts and those of my hygienist.
My partner did notice a few things:
My Partner: 2mg
We were sitting around the dinner table when my partner said, “I think I’m a lot more talkative when I take rapa. Like I’m chatting everybody up all day long.” I wonder if this is related to that sense of euphoria that some people say they feel when they dose. For example, some people have said they don’t dose in the evenings, because they have a hard time falling asleep afterwards.
I feel like I’ve noticed the chattiness too.
I usually take my dose on Wednesday mornings around 7:30am and I have a major morning meeting at 10:30am. I swear I’m more talkative at those meetings when I’ve taken a dose of rapamycin, sometimes to the good and sometimes not. Have you noticed becoming more social or more talkative on your dosing day? I’d be curious to hear.
A secondary effect my partner is wondering about has to do with slowed healing from bruises.
Three days before her last dose she had a cortisone shot for a stubbornly painful joint. While the doctor was administering the injection, he moved the needle around in her joint, saying this would bring blood to the area and speed her recovery. Apparently it hurt like the dickens.
The next day (day two), her joint was bruised, as you might imagine. On day three, the bruise was the same as day two. On day four, she took 1mg of rapamycin; the bruise was slightly diminishing. On day five, the bruise was suddenly 3-5 times bigger than it had been! This large bruise did not increase any further, but remained that size as it slowly faded over about 10 days time.
She also had a second experience regarding bruising.
While some cousins were visiting she got shot in the shins a few times with a nerf pellet gun. She was playing with them outside and the whole thing was silly and part of a game. It was Nerf after all. But the next day she had two pretty sizable perfectly round bruises on her legs with a little welt in the center. We think it must have been the pellets. It’s now been 12 days and they’re still visible, though fading. That’s longer than ever for bruises for her.
This is something we’ll watch. She finishes her anti-fungal course this week so she’ll be able to start working up to goal of 4mg weekly.
The Dog: 3mg every week
Nothing new to report on the dog. She’s doing great, happy as a clam, healthy, energetic, and social. We’ll continue the rapa and continue to watch.
Me:
I picked up another throat thing from the kids I work with. It’s tame but came with a little laryngitis. When this passes I’ll take another 6mg dose and start the 10 day clock again!
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Scooter, is in the TRIAD ( Test of Rapamycin in Aging Dogs ) study portion of the Dog Aging Project. He is on a placebo or rapamycin and has been for 7 weeks. I was certain he.was on the placebo until one day I was throwing a ball for him and I was use to seeing him slow down after a good number of chases. When he did not tire as I expected I suspect he maybe on the med.
Note: My wife started by increasing the dose 1mg per week she is up to two. I have been taking 5mg/wk for a couple months now and have not noticed any thing worth reporting.
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Hi there! Glad you and your dog are doing so well.
Can I ask: for your dog, are you doing anything in regards to using an “enteric coated capsule” to bypass the stomach acid, and increase availability? I just found out that it’s possibly a big deal (if you’re not using the Rapamune, but a generic), but am confused as to what exact type of capsule, and at what time to give before or after a fatty meal.
Best, Jeff
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Hi Jeff, welcome to the forums. The problem with bioavailability is not with the generics or rapamune, its with the compounded pharmacy capsule versions of rapamycin. More details here: New Peter Attia interview w/Matt Kaeberlein, inferior bioavailability of encapsulated rapa
Most of us just give our dogs the same generic rapamycin that we take ourselves and it works fine.
Generally you want to have the fatty meal just before, or with, the rapamycin. Details are here: Improve Bioavailability of Rapamycin (2)
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Hi there! Glad you and your dog are doing so well.
Can I ask: for your dog, are you doing anything in regards to using an “enteric coated capsule” to bypass the stomach acid, and increase availability?
hey there, thanks so much for the response! Since it’d been a little while since the last thread on the ‘enteric capsules’, I just wondered if there was any consensus yet?
(Unfortunately, the only place I can get Rap from currently is via a compounding pharmacy, so am just looking for best way to make it go the extra mile for my dog).
Again, thank you for taking the time to message.
I think most people just avoid the compounding pharmacy versions of rapamycin, but I recommend you read more here: Bioavailability of Rapamycin From Compounding Pharmacy
But - you probably want to talk to the pharmacy, explain the issue to them and get their guarantee that the capsules are designed with enteric coating because of the well-known bioavailability issues.
You can also read up here how some people (not what I would recommend) are using rapamycin powder and encapsulating the powder: How many are making their own solutions from powder?
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I echo everything RapAdmin said.
We give our dog the same pills that we’re taking. We purchased them from India, as many here have done. They arrived in 2-3 weeks without any trouble. There’s a thread on trusted Indian suppliers which I believe is easily found through the “RapamycinFAQ” link found at the top of the page in a desktop browser.
The pills made for humans have the coating to make it through the stomach. I’m not sure how a compounding pharmacy accomplishes the same, but the general consensus is that stomach acid will decimate the Rapamycin and leave your body with little to absorb.
The fatty meal is not necessary. The consensus is that it increases bioavailability by about 30%. Humans tend to use the fatty meal as a way to get more Rapamycin into the bloodstream, meaning you can take fewer pills for the same level of absorption.
For this reason we don’t give our dog a fatty meal with rapa. She gets what she gets through her normal food, plus a little “spray treat” we found in the pet section which is like a whipped cream sprayer but it dispenses something gooey that dogs like. This helps hide the pills.
Good luck and best wishes. Our dog is doing great. She’s 12 and has been on rapa for around 8 weeks.
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Hey, thank you both SO much for taking the time to respond to me. I truly, truly appreciate it. Will read everything you suggest, and take all advice pronto.
Best to both of ya’ll, and your pets.
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Fortunately, my medication is precribed and I get my rapamycin from a pharmacy by prescription.
That said, I know many use Zydus from India and have the same results in themseves and dog. No problems getting it bought - shipped - and through customs (smaller orders) and it is the real deal.
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The heavy bleeding with your wife’s period being helped by rapamycin was interesting. My wife has a bleeding disorder called HHT (excessive blood vessel growth) which caused frequent lifelong nosebleeds which was completely alleviated by rapamycin. Maybe a blood vessel regulating mechanism is corrected by rapa.
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My dog gets her rapa from https://naturalpet.health/ it comes in a capsule form…she weighs 60 pounds and gets 3 mg on monday, wednesday and friday…she has been on it for over 6 months and is doing really well…she has joint issues and aches and pains due to a metatarsal injury when she was younger and her endurance and lack of limping and just overall energy is amazing…granted she is 3 years old but it has been an obvious improvement
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Three Thoughts Update
As I reflect back on these almost 3 months of Rapamycin usage, three thoughts occur to me:
1. Low dose effectiveness?
I keep harkening back to my experience early on, where a single 1mg dose gave me a canker sore and seemed to shake up my system over night. Other effects seemed to mount in those early weeks, including reduced shoulder pain, improved gum health, and another canker sore.
What’s interesting to me is that all of this occurred on really low doses of 1mg/week, then 2mg/week, then 3mg/week. By week four I was seeing these changes.
I weigh around 185 lbs. and I’m shy of 50 years old. I wouldn’t have thought that such low doses would register in my biology at all, and yet they did.
This makes me wonder if low doses of rapamycin might actually be effective doses. More significantly, it makes me wonder if low doses of rapamycin might actually be more useful and more health-inducing than high doses.
Obviously this flies in the face of the research we’ve all read, where more is always better if you’re a mouse.
Several hypotheses might be that our systems are more sensitive to rapamycin, or that too much rapamycin creates some push-back in the body, or that it’s useful to give more time between MTOR regulation.
Another hypothesis would be as follows in item #2.
I’m certainly not advocating for low doses or suggesting that I know better than the experts researching these things. I just find it fascinating that low doses had a large impact on my heath very quickly, whereas a dose of 7mg seemed to be met by a giant “huh” by my body. Then again, who is to say what might be happening beneath the surface where I can’t see?
I’m tempted to return to low doses for a few weeks to see if anything changes. I’m also tempted to try one or two very high doses to see what I might feel, as I mention in #3 below.
2. Side effects as Purification?
As I think about my experience above, one explanation could be that my MTOR was out of control and rapamycin shocked it back into balance.
This would follow the overactive-MTOR1 theory of aging, which suggests that as we age our MTOR1 gets stuck in the ON position. Since deactivated MTOR1 engages cellular cleansing mechanisms, an overactive MTOR1 would keep one’s body from effectively cleaning up cellular damage.
So my thought, my curiosity, is that perhaps even those early small doses were enough to shock my MTOR1 into a level of cleansing that it had not done in a long time. In such a situation, I might imagine that there was a lot of cellular garbage that needed to be taken out.
Thus, I wonder if rapid rapamycin “side effects” like a canker sores, and rapid rapamycin “effects” like immediately improved gum health, might come from that sudden spring cleaning of the cells.
To my mind, I might liken this to a “purification effect” of rapamycin, or even a “purification hypothesis” of rapamycin usage. By this hypothesis, the longer you use rapamycin, the fewer effects you will see, because it is purifying your system. Early purification efforts will find lots of cellular garbage, so early effects will be strong. As the garbage is collected and removed, the system becomes more and more pure, or balanced, or as-intended, or whatever metaphor you want to use. Thus, even more rapamycin might not cause such side effects, and might not cause such obvious or immediate changes.
This also aligns with some of the research I’ve read on this page that suggests that mice that take rapamycin for only a period of time (I can’t recall the period, but let’s say 6 months) and then no longer receive rapamycin continue to have longevity effects and health effects for the rest of their lives.
One might imagine that once you get your cellular garbage cleaned up, it becomes easier for the body to maintain that state as it is not working against a backlog of garbage, but only has to deal with the new stuff.
It’s just an idea.
Also, I’m aware that it contradicts some of the ideas in the previous section, in the sense that it’s not that low doses are more effective than high doses, rather the early low doses were dealing with a high level of cellular garbage so they made a large immediate impact.
3. Really high dose?
This leads to my third thought. I’m beginning to wonder if I should take at least one really high dose.
The goals would be:
-
To shock the system into some major cleaning, beyond what has been done by standard rapa dosing before.
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To potentially pass the blood-brain barrier at least once, which I read is more likely or more effective with higher doses.
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To see if high doses cause any immediate changes, good or bad, to my physiology.
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To approximate the very high doses that made a large impact on mice in some studies.
In the plan I’m formulating I would not take multiple high doses, I would take 2-3 weeks to allow for a reset before another rapamycin dose, and I would probably accomplish the high dose with grapefruit as a multiplier.
Therefore, I might take 4-6mg, once, with grapefruit 3 hours before and with the dose, and wait 3 weeks before another more regular dose.
Obviously my definition of “very high dose” is not an insane level. I think the most I would be comfortable with is 20-35mg. Since grapefruit can multiply the effective dose by 3.5-7x (by increasing bioavailability through improved absorption), that leaves me at the 4-6mg level.
I’m not set on it. Just something I’m thinking about.
Inevitably, I feel I’ll settle into something like 8 mg/14 days. A period of 10 days is 5 half-lives and therefore probably the right length of time for the average person to get rid of all the rapamycin in their body. Ten days is inconvenient when it comes to following a schedule, so I’ll probably stick with 14 days.
(Since 1mg of rapamycin had such an impact on my body early on, I’m counting even 0.5mg of rapamycin in my body as an effective dose. Therefore I’m not yet comfortable with a weekly dosing schedule. Since it’s by-weekly I figure the initial dose might as well pack a punch, even 8-10mg.)
My Partner and My Dog
My partner has finished her course of the anti-fungal. We now have a new device in the house, an in-shoe UV zapper with opaque bags for the shoes and a 15 minute timer. She’s dead set on not having this return.
With her course done, she took 4mg of rapa this week and got her period on day 2 or so after the dose. She said it was uncommonly light, but increased a bit after 4 days, which would have been rapa-dose-day 6. Recall she’s been taking roughly 1mg/week for the past 6-8 weeks.
Our dog is still happy as a clam. Still taking 3mg a week in some “Kong Easy Treat” which is a spray goo that she loves and which easily hides pills.
I took 7mg two weeks ago with no ill effects or obvious effects of any kind.
We’ll check back in a few weeks. Feedback, thoughts, and opinions are always welcome!
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I’ve had some similar thoughts that possibly side effects are actually healing processes happening but what do I know! Thanks for the update.
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@HigoMe33 did you get any tests for the dog before starting rapamycin? I am starting rapamycing for me and my dog soon and since I am getting at least some tests before hand and probably will keep track of some markers at least every few months I was wandering what about my dogs? should they get tested as well?
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I did not test my dog before starting her on rapa. My thought was that many animals have been used in Rapamycin trials over the years (I feel like I remember the number 50), including large mammals, and the safety profile as I understand it has been good.
I’m not recommending against tests for the dog. It’s probably a good idea. But I did not do any tests and do not plan to.
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RAPA WITH GRAPEFRUIT
Since I last wrote I took 7mg of Rapamycin in a two-week interval and experienced no side effects. After that I did a one-interval test of high dosage.
For my high-dosage test of Rapamycin I decided to involve grapefruit for its reported effects of subduing an enzyme in the digestive tract that allows a much larger amount of rapa to be absorbed into the body before it is metabolized away.
The Process
In my personal rapamycin.news notes I have an entry that says “White Grapefruit”. Someone on this site must have noted that white grapefruit would have a larger effect than
pink grapefruit. Unfortunately, our grocery store only stocks pink grapefruit. I bought two.
I see that some people have opted to take grapefruit juice from a bottle. I wanted to eat the real thing, figuring it would be a good idea to remain as close to nature as possible. However, I am curious about the different effects of different grapefruit varieties. If I cannot find real white grapefruit I plan to use white grapefruit juice in a future test.
My notes said it would be best to eat one grapefruit several hours before taking rapa and another as I dose. For the early grapefruit, my notes suggested a gap of 2-4 hours would be ideal. I opted for a 2-hour time gap.
On the subject of cutting the grapefruit, I realized I was overdoing it. In my family of origin we always sectioned each little fruit area of a grapefruit so a spoon could pop out each triangle of fruit. I started to do that, but found it difficult because the skin of the grapefruit sections was so tender. In the olden days grapefruit skin was a lot tougher, as I recall. In the end I cut around the outer edge of the fruit in a full circle, then cut the donut of grapefruit into 5 or 6 edible bites. It was much faster, and nbd as the kids say. No big deal. I ate both sides of the grapefruit, the whole fruit, at this time.
My stomach was not a huge fan of grapefruit at 5:30 am, but I worked through it.
Two hours later I ate a second pink grapefruit and took 6mg of rapa at the same time. If pink grapefruit qualifies as a magnification agent, I figure I took 15-30mg equivalent.
I plan to wait three weeks before my next dose.
Effects
I noticed three things this time around.
First, in the days that followed this dosing I noticed my lips twitching on one or two occasions. This was notable, as it is very uncommon for me. The twitches were super-slight. They happened on perhaps 3 or 4 occasions over the first 3 or 4 days, each time for maybe 5 seconds. So, slight, but of interest.
Second, while I did not get the “euphoria” that some people have reported on high doses of rapa, I have had a LOT more energy lately. It’s not like a burst of energy or the kind of uptick that later takes a toll. More like a constant flow of energy to work hard and long while remaining pleasant and balanced.
It felt good.
Third, I am sleeping less. I usually awaken around 7am and go to bed around 10:30pm, giving me around 8.5 hours of sleep. (I do not set an alarm, but awaken naturally.) For the last week since this dose I have been going to sleep around 11pm and awakening naturally around 5am. So, I typically get 8.5 hours of sleep but now am requiring only 6 hours of sleep.
I keep waiting to pay the piper, figuring that I’ll eventually need to nap or that I’ll have a day of 10 hours of sleep. It hasn’t happened yet. My body is happy to stay awake longer and awaken sooner.
We’ll see if it holds.
Others
My partner continues to take 5mg of rapa a week. She hasn’t given me any updates, but it’s only been three weeks or so since she started these doses.
Our dog continues to take 3mg of rapa a week. She continues to take on more youthful characteristics. For example, it has been ages since she was spry enough to steal other dogs’ toys and run around the field with them. Lately she has been doing this from time to time. It’s great to see her have that young dog spunk again.
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More Rapa with More Grapefruit
After my first dose of 7mg rapa with grapefruit I waited 3 weeks before another dose. During the first 2.5 weeks of that time I felt… young again.
It’s weird, in that I spent a lot of time sitting on my rear end typing on my computer, and yet I felt energetic and just a little bit more alive than normal. On very long days (12 hours of work), I had not only enough stamina to make it through, but enough to be magnanimous and emotionally curious at the end of that time, when I would usually have emotionally shut down by that point.
I do some teaching, and I found myself to be a bit more loquacious than usual. But the ideas came quickly and easily and it was no problem to hold and develop a complex train of thought. Not that it’s usually difficult, but I did feel 10-20% more capable, or as though the effort required was 10-20% less than usual.
At the end of those 2.5 weeks I felt like I stepped of a cliff back to normal. The last 3 or 4 days of the three weeks felt like a slog.
If the half-life of rapa is roughly 2.5 days, and if my 7mg with grapefruit (2-ish hours before and with the dosage) and olive oil equated to roughly 28mg, then here’s what I estimate was the dosage in my blood:
Day 0.0: 28mg
Day 2.5: 14mg
Day 5.0: 7mg
Day 7.5: 3.5mg
Day 10.0: 1.75mg
Day 12.5: 0.875mg
Day 15.0: 0.44mg
Day 17.5: 0.22mg
Day 20.0: 0.11mg
By this measure, (and yes, there is a lot of guessing going on here), I stopped feeling the effects of rapa at around a quarter of a milligram. Given that my initial 1mg dose had noticeable effects on me, including a mouth sore, this seems reasonable.
Lots of time between
Chalk it up to my being overly careful, but I am waiting three weeks between grapefuit-doses. I want days of low-to-no rapa in the blood stream before kicking it back up.
Effects / Side Effects?
I haven’t had a mouth sore in 2.5 months – not since I got a COVID sore throat and a back-of-the-throat mouth sore at the same time around the first of the year.
Having taken a second grapefruit-dose of 7mg four days ago, I’ve had no problem sleeping. I’ve also not experienced the super-early wake-ups that I did with the last dose. Perhaps that effect was due to work/life stress, or maybe it arises in week two of a large dose. We’ll see.
I have had a bit of “loose stool” as they say. I recall some people on this forum mentioning diarrhea as a side effect of large doses. I wouldn’t quite call it diarrhea per se, but yeah, that’s enough on that.
Most of all – and this is how I described it to my partner – being on a largeish dose of rapa feels a lot like being young again. In fact, that’s a little working theory of mine, not that I’m in medicine. But when I take a rapa dose, I feel like my body works as it did in my late 20’s or early 30’s for a few days. With grapefruit-doses it seems to last for up to two weeks. I like it. It’s not really like a drug, in that I don’t feel my personality or perspective is being altered, nor my consciousness. I’m just more energetic and emotionally generous, less irritable, and generally a nicer person.
I’ve also been taking on a boatload of projects! Why? Because I want to. I recall reading a post on this forum where an older woman said that her older husband on rapa has been a whirlwind of activity in their home, fixing things that have been lying broken or in need of attention for months or years. I get that. I’ve been sort of doing the same. But again, it’s not compulsive. It’s just that I feel like doing it.
I haven’t gotten any blood tests since before I began rapa. That was in early December and it’s now late March, so 4 months ago. I’m planning to hold out to Month 6, which would mean getting another set of blood tests some time in May. I’m nervous that my cholesterol might be rising – a known side effect. I guess I’ve heard of people having issues with glucose control, but I need to read more because I’m not sure what those details are and I certainly haven’t experienced sugar issues that I’m aware of. Nevertheless, I am eating oatmeal every day (good for cholesterol), and I’m trying to be careful of things like egg yolks (max two a day), and red meat.
My partner
After several weeks of 4-5mg/wk my partner hopped on the grapefruit train this week. She took 4mg, having one whole grapefruit about two hours before dosage and another whole grapefruit with dosage.
Like me, she’s experienced zero negative side effects. I wonder what we should be looking for? Is there some reason that people don’t take massive doses every two or three weeks and instead choose to take 5-7mg weekly? I need to do more reading here, but I invite comments on this thread if you have thoughts to share.
My partner likes to say that rapa makes her talk more. To be fair she’s a great communicator; she’s wonderful on the phone or at lunch with friends, talking for hours, whereas I’m ready to hang up after about 3 minutes of a call. Still, it’s her experience that rapa energizes her communication.
She also noticed an effect on her period.
If you’ve read this thread you’ll recall she took about 45 days off of rapa while taking another medication. But she’d taken rapa for close to a month before that break. During that time she said she noticed that her period was miraculously lighter than usual --at first-- and then it kicked up near the end.
Well, her periods were normal during the rapa vacation, which is to say heavy, long-lasting, and annoying; but they have changed again since resuming dosage.
This month her period was again surprisingly light and manageable. She was in awe. Again, it kicked into gear on day 4 or so, which was not cool. But it’s still lighter than usual. She’s hoping this effect will continue on. As a reminder, she’s around 50, so menopause may be kicking in.
Our pup
We keep giving our dog 3mg a week (she’s 40 lbs), and she keeps reverse aging before our eyes, at least on the level of behavior. Did I mention that people have started noticing? The neighbor, relatives who have visited the house. We continue to see no negative effects. It seems like she’s happier, so that makes us happy.
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I love your well-written updates - they are fun to read. Thanks for posting! I have very similar experiences with taking rapamycin.
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