Hey everyone,
I’m thinking about Rapamycin as off-label use. I try to base my approach to health and longevity as much on data as possible. So I was wondering what biomarkers are actually positively influenced by taking Rapamycin.
So far my research gave me this list:
Insulin sensitivity → may improve insulin sensitivity and reduce blood glucose levels
Inflammatory markers → could reduce levels of inflammatory cytokines like IL-6 and TNF-alpha
Oxidative stress → potential reduction in oxidative stress markers, though evidence is less direct
Longevity markers → may reduce IGF-1 levels
Cholesterol and lipids → possibly improves lipid profiles
Telomere length → Indirect evidence suggests potential benefits for maintaining telomere length
I wonder which markers you track to validate the benefits of Rapamycin? Or if you take a more ‘intuitive’ approach?
Hi Claude, welcome to the forums. Pretty much all of us here are using rapamycin off-label, for longevity purposes.
You have good questions, but unfortunately we really don’t have good answers yet in terms of what blood biomarkers to track for longevity purposes (broadly speaking, and also specifically for rapamycin, or any other “longevity” drug).
Longevity biomarkers (and the closely related issue of blood markers for longevity) are still an evolving science with few definitive protocols right now. Some of us here track our longevity biomarkers via the Levine Phenotypic calculations, others via commercial biomarker tests like TrueDiagnostics. A Friendly Biological Age Reduction Competition?
But - those are still far from definitive.
Most of us do blood marker tracking more for identification of problematic side effects like blood lipids, and blood sugar levels, etc. - to make sure we are not doing anything harmful to our bodies, and to correct these trends early if we experience them (either through modulation of rapamycin dosing, or addition of medications like acarbose, canagliflozin, metformin, or statins, etc.).
Really, I think the state of the science is that we know that rapamycin extends life in every organism its been tested in, typically between 15% and 25% (tested in yeast, worms, flies, mice and most recently in marmoset monkeys / primates). I think most of us here take rapamycin based on this data, and the expectation that this trend will continue and prove true in humans but the short-term measurement tools that validate this just are not available yet with the validation we’d want. Over the next few years with a little luck these will become available, but until then I think the “intuitive” approach is mostly what we go by. If you are feeling good (or feel nothing) and your “negative side effects” are minimal or managed, then the risk/reward seems to be worth it for most of us.