I just got the results of some blood work. I did not test specifically for rapa levels, but I’ve been taking 6mg a week for about a year. What I was concerned about was whether rapa would affect lipid, glucose, and insulin levels.
Total cholesterol
Today 179, before rapa 188
Triglyceride
Today 63, before rapa 47
HDL
Today 89, before rapa 88
VLDL
Today 12, before rapa 9
LDL
Today 78, before rapa 91
Fasting Glucose
Today 95, before rapa 92
Fasting Insulin
Today 2.5, before rapa 3.0
Insulin resistance score
Today <25, before rapa <25
HOMA-IR
Today 0.6, before rapa 0.68
AlC
Today 5.2, before rapa 5.1
CRP
Today 0.3, before rapa 0.23
Looks like rapa has not had any major effects on metabolic health, which is good.
Incidentally, I eat low carb and I am not taking any statins.
Just a general note for people here. This forum software is pretty good in terms of maintaining the layout of tables that you may want to copy from a spreadsheet or on a pre-existing website.
So - as an example - I took Dexter’s information above and threw it into a Google Sheet (spreadsheet), and then copy and past it below. If you track variables like this in a spreadsheet - its very easy to copy and paste here at the site… so I encourage you to track your bloodwork, and paste it here in the forums when you want to report on things (and since sharing our data helps everyone here, I encourage you to do it). More info, see Quantified Self: https://quantifiedself.com
Stupid question, but what specific biomarkers is rapa supposed to improve? I know it lowers mTOR but what are the downstream effects of doing so and how can they be quantified?
So, we don’t know exactly why rapamycin provides such high levels of lifespan extension in all the research studies. One of the key means that people think it works is by increasing autophagy. Unfortunately we don’t have any good ways of measuring that in a clinic yet, so no good biomarkers. You can read more about this issue here: Measuring Autophagy in Body and Brain, Comparing Autophagy Activators
Another way rapamycin is thought to work, and increase longevity, is via reductions in inflammation. There are different measures of inflammation, CRP (best measured by the High Sensitivity CRP blood test), but there are also many other measures, including IL-6, etc. (Interlukin-6), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), and procalcitonin (PCT), etc.
I’ve not dove deep into the inflammatory biomarkers however - so perhaps others can comment on them.
Another pontential area of biomarkers to track that should be significantly improved with rapamycin are senescent cells and SASP:
a… drug screen using human primary fibroblasts identified rapamycin as a potent inhibitor of SASP (Herranz et al., 2015). As previously discussed, SASP and senescence in immune cells as well as in HSCs, contribute to age-associated pathologies (Chen et al., 2009; Desdín-Micó et al., 2020). Therefore, preventing immune senescence in older people with rapamycin or other rapalogs appears to be a promising approach in the development of geroprotective treatments for diseases that disproportionally affect the elderly, such as seasonal flu, COVID-19 and osteoarthritis (Bischof et al., 2021; Dhanabalan et al., 2021 preprint). Source: Autophagy takes it all – autophagy inducers target immune aging | Disease Models & Mechanisms | The Company of Biologists
Certainly not a stupid question. I’ve been taking rapamycin for the better part of two years and it has not improved any of my bio-markers that I am aware of. Quite the opposite, I now have to work hard to keep my bio-markers in the “good” range.
I feel I have had a lot of benefits from taking rapamycin that I have posted in other threads so I won’t go into them here.
Using the Lustgarten spreadsheet, phenotypic age is 51.58 versus actual age of 59.5.
However, plugging in the 2022 (pre-rapa) numbers, phenotypic age was 48.3 versus actual age of 58.2
Thus one could say that my phenotypic age has gotten slightly worse under rapa - I was “10 years younger” phenotypically in 2022 versus “8 years younger” now.
But I think the variation in the biomarkers may account for this. I don’t think the tests are that precise. I could probably have blood taken again tomorrow and the results would give me “ten years younger” again versus the “eight years younger” that I just got.
I’m right there with you. My Aging.ai age got worse but my Levine did not. My epigenetic age got better. So on 3 different calculators 1 got better, 1 got worse and 1 stayed the same after Rapa. Go figure.
They are converging better now though. Aging.ai and Levine both say I am 13 years younger now. Epigenetic spit test says I’m 11 years older
Your results are great! Have you observed any subjective difference since you started Rapamycin? I suspect that the potential benefits of Rapamycin are not all encapsulated in the tests currently available.
Frankly no. I attribute my feelings of well-being to diet and exercise, which I was already doing before I started rapa. Possibly I would have noticed more of a difference if I was more sickly and decrepit before I started the rapa…
if anyone has recommendations / thoughts on good inflammation panel / tests that would be amazing