New Rapamycin User, seeking advice and best practices

Welcome Basil.
As Matt Kaeberlein, Dr. Peter Attia and others have stated, hard to know your side effects as it is pretty individualized.

But, if you are in that 5% of users in which negative results happen… just stop and everything returns to normal as has been seen time and time again.

Personally, I would suggest an epigenetic pre-use test for a baseline and follow-up retest every 6 months. I like TruMe . Spit sample.

I just took the GlycanAge test tonight. Blood sample. It is mentioned in the forum. Results in 4 weeks.

Definitely monitor your blood work which tells more if currently rapa use is doing no harm.

Best wishes.

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Thank you so much for replying so quickly @Agetron.

I took a test from MyDNAge a while back. Assuming all is okay with biomarkers I’ll take another one after 6 months on rapa.

I was thinking of cycling 8 weeks on 5 weeks off.

Cheers

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Do what feels comfortable. I have gone nonstop almost 2 years - 6mg a week.

Past month… and tonight 10 mg… high fat meal… lots of grapefruit juice. Never had a problem. Blood tests are spectacular.

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Oh great! So would it be fair to say that not many people who take rapa intermittently have problems with LDL and fasting blood sugar?

Labs I would consider tracking are fasting insulin / HOMA-IR (insulin sensitivity), glucose levels (ideally checking fasting and post-prandial excursions), creatinine/eGFR, CBC (mainly to watch out for anemia and low platelets), iron/ferritin levels, cholesterol levels, and white blood cells (especially monitoring for low lymphocytes). All of these potential side effects have been reported in persons taking sirolimus, although the majority of those reports are in persons taking daily it for post-transplant immunosuppression.

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Hi Basil,

Welcome to the site. Its funny… don’t expect dramatic results quickly… I’ve been on it for almost 3 years now, and the improvements for me at least, are slow and steady. For me the results came slowly and you only notice them after a while when something is “gone”… little aches and pains that don’t bother you any more, more energy, more stamina, less need for sleep, things like that - slowly creep up on you until one day you say wow - and realize things are much better than they used to be.

If you can, I’d do blood tests every quarter / 3 months.

Have you checked out the dosing protocols page?

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Yes - I think that typically only happens at very high doses, or continual (daily doses) which we typically don’t do for “anti-aging”.

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Welcome.
You look young, so I’d start slow at maybe 2 mg and advance very slowly. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Females have lower TOR levels and are also more sensitive to TOR inhibition.
Many notice that weight loss is easier, but not necessarily automatic with rapamycin.
The drug is an anti inflammatory so my overall WBC count dropped to under 5.0.
It also increases cardiac ejection fraction so after 3 months you may notice an increase in exercise capacity.
I fully agree that if we’re taking this drug for health/ lifespan that it’s counterintuitive to take other drugs to negate its effects. Metformin is a mitochondrial inhibitor and greatly reduced my exercise capacity.
For lipids , I’m most concerned with trig/ hdl ratio. This can be modified with diet and exercise without resorting to meds. Doubt that it will be affected.
Don’t fully rely on rapamycin. Consider Mediterranean diet and other useful supplements as well.

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Thank you @brandy111

That is very helpful.

@RapAdmin , I noticed in some of the threads that you have reported elevated LDL. Do you mind me asking what dose you are taking?

8 to 10mg per week, will be adding back a statin. I have generally had high LDL, but up about 20% with rapamycin

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@rivasp12 , thanks for this great insight.

Yes, I have read that about Metformin and I exercise every day, so I don’t want anything messing with that.

I already have a good diet, so there isn’t much more I can do there.

I’m super sensitive to supplements and my body usually responds by screwing up my sleep. I tried nmn, resveratrol and magnesium, titrating from tiny doses. All screwed with my sleep, and in my opinion sleep is the most important factor, so I had to give up the experiment.

I do take omega 3 and vitamin D, and get my D levels checked every 6 months.

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Thanks @RapAdmin , I can’t imagine myself going that high.

Do women generally need less?

@RapAdmin I have not! I will do that now.

Thank you very much:)

No, but its highly personal in terms of response

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Be sure to read the rapamycin FAQ at the top of the page in the header of the site.

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Rapamycin is keeping lipids out of your cells so your blood levels are going up. That’s why we coat stents with rapamycin.

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RapAdmin, curious to hear your reasoning for returning to weekly dosing from biweekly.

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You know… I don’t see much difference between the two (from a data perspective - though obviously more data on the weekly side because we have the Mannick papers on weekly) and I tend to find it just a little bit easier to follow a weekly schedule.

I think my next tweak on my dosing will be to alternate between everolimus and rapamycin / sirolimus on a week by week basis, due to the potential BBB benefits.

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Thank you, RapAdmin. Just out of curiosity, did you notice any changes to your lab results (positive or negative) after doing the the higher dose biweekly protocol?