Hi. I’m a longtime life extension advocate/practitioner and short time lurker of this excellent user group. I’m 52, male. In the past I practiced moderate to extreme calorie restriction for 7 years following Walford’s CRON program with excellent health results but diminishing quality of life (basically a contraction in my emotional “range”).
A little over 2 years ago I started adding Rapamycin to my “stack” and never looked back. Despite 2 bacterial infections in the first year and infrequent mouth sores my experience with it has been extremely good. I now purchase all of my RX from Maulik (who I found from this user group – Thanks!) and save a ton by doing it! I recently have been trying to understand how to optimize my Rapa protocol. I have done a blood test at the end of the week to ensure there is no Rapa in my blood. Since then I have 1) added Capsugel DRcaps to take my 4 weekly pills and 2) added grapefruit on day 1 and day 2, (in addition to day 0 prior to the Rapamycin). The intent is to get a higher initial dose and keep it in my blood longer. I will test my blood again soon to ensure that I have no measurable rapamycin on day 6 of the week and thus likely no TORC2 impact. The blood test from gethealthspan.com is reasonably priced at $25.
I did 23andme years ago and recently discovered the free site geneticgenie.org. If you download your raw 23andme data to the site it will give you a nice report on your genetic profile that is much more extensive than 23andme. In my case I discovered I have a 70% reduction in folate/b12 methylation due to a homozygous MTHFR gene. Of particular interest to this group: the free report will also evaluate your genetic response to drugs, and among those evaluated is tacrolimus, which could provide insight into your sirolimus response based on the similar structure and binding of the 2 drugs.
I appreciate the collective knowledge in this group and I humbly submit my “stack” for your feedback (I try to follow the gethealthspan autophagy/AMPK cycling protocol for the 3 Rapa days and 4 non-Rapa days)…
Welcome to the community, Brett1! That’s a pretty massive stack. I would recommend throwing the various drugs and supplements into the search function here, and reading up. That will likely be more information than contained in a post from an individual member here. You will find different approaches to building a stack, and you can see what you are comfortable with. For example I personally am very slow to add meds and supplements to my stack, taking into account my particular health status, as a result my stack is a lot smaller than many others including yours. Keep reading and seeing what speaks to you, your goals and approach. Best of luck!
I plan to make a longer post about this when I’m more fully returned to a steady state – am coming back from signficant methylation impairment due to trusting doctors about doses (don’t get me started).
I figured out what was going on, based on my stack, blood tests, history, genetics, empirical data, and all the rest, using Claude-AI, which is the best system I’ve yet found for this sort of work.
Claude-AI takes non-trivial set-up (I put in 30 hours) and an understanding of how the system works so you can stress-test and critique reasoning chains, but it’s beyond impressive, especially if, like me, you have compound genetic variances that make for non-standard medical diagnoses.
Consider this as a tool that is perhaps more robust than any single advisor.
I’ll address the stack later, but the more important question is how are your blood tests? Have you done any fairly comprehensive blood testing to see how you’re doing on all your key biomarkers… Lipids, metabolic, hormones, etc.?
RapAdmin,
For blood tests I’ve done a CBC with my annual exam and also the gethealthspan basic lab which has CBC, cholesterol, glucose/A1C, kidney/liver measure and electrolyte balance (no hormones). The only thing that was “out of bounds” was a high measure for monocytes (12%), which I’m guessing my be from MTHFR and low folate / high homocysteine, stress. LDL was 49 (but at the time I was on 5mg rosuvastatin and I have haved it now), glucose was 104 and I was fasting and on day 4 of my rapa cycle. From these basic measures gethealthspan (plus their magic 8-ball filled with numbers) were able to deduce that my realage is 39, lol! When I have my annual physical in about a month I plan on asking for a homocysteine blood test and anything related that can be used to help me manage my B vitamin levels. Based on Sol’s feedback I have been using AI promts (not Claude yet, just Google) to evaluate each item in my stack and it’s impact on my condition and I’ve made quite a few adjustments, mostly removing items that can impact folate - thanks Sol!
