I am wondering whether to give my mother in her 80s rapamycin. What are the thoughts on the safety of this?
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.3009892
Dr Mannick’s lab did this study with a rapalog in people over 65 and had very positive results in terms of safety and immune function.
I think when talking about relatives, it’s especially important to have rapamycin use monitored and prescribed by a doctor, not gray market diy. The potential damage to your relationship if there are any issues is very high. Or even in the event that your mother has an unrelated medical event and ER doctors are horrified that she is taking rapamycin sourced over the internet by her child.
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In my experience the issue is not so much the age, but rather the pre-existing conditions and other medications. I got my parents on rapamycin in their 80s, but they’ve been having many other health issues and were slowly increasing other medications at the same time, so in the interest of keeping things as simple as possible they dropped the rapamycin.
I think that the benefit of rapamycin at 80+ can be great, but its best if the person is in reasonable health already, without a lot of poly pharmacy issues and pre-existing conditions. Just my opinion from a non-medical professional who has some experience with the issue.
There is a discussion about this from a group in the UK that is working (generally) on this issue:
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This is a paper that covers the risks associated with poly pharmacy (taking numerous different drugs)… something that everyone here should be aware of. There are risks associated with increasing your “stack” of longevity drugs and supplements:
An incrementally higher number of daily prescribed medications was found to be associated with increasingly higher risk for hospitalization and mortality. These associations were consistent across subgroups of age, sex, residential area, and comorbidities. Furthermore, polypharmacy was associated with greater risk of hospitalization and death: adjusted HRs (95% CIs) were 1.18 (1.18–1.19) and 1.25 (1.24–1.25) in the overall and 1.16 (1.16–1.17) and 1.25 (1.24–1.25) in the matched cohorts, respectively. Hence, polypharmacy was associated with a higher risk of hospitalization and all-cause death among elderly individuals.
Polypharmacy, hospitalization, and mortality risk: a nationwide cohort study
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For most of the patients in this study, polypharmacy equates to the number of diseases or conditions. They are treatments prescribed by a doctor and not taken by individual choice by healthy people. So for those taking 5 or more prescription drugs in this study, the drugs are being used to treat several diseases\conditions. The more drugs being taken, the worse the health of the patient (assumption here).
I think what would be useful for us if this study was done on healthy individuals taking supplements to see if poly-supplementation has any effect on lifespan.
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Agreed that such a study would be very useful. Does not lessen the concern that any drug or supplement could impact the activity of another drug or supplement.
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