I was glad to see the effect of Rapamycin on the thymus gland in the study, but what I really need is to heal my adrenal glands. I make almost no cortisol. I’ve been taking Rapamycin (6 mgs per week in one dose) for over 2 years, but haven’t noticed any improvement, so I am switching to Everolimus.
I would appreciate hearing from anyone who knows whether there is hope for adrenal healing with either drug.
any suggestions re: where to get rapamycin?
Hehe, unfortunately the real reasons are pretty boring:
If you only use male mice, reviewers and maybe Editors will complain. There’s a big drive in publication now to strive for more gender/sex equality. So using female mice basically neutralises that criticism.
Using two sexes of mice won’t help you publish in a better journal. Journals care much more about novelty (new ideas)
Using two sexes of mice, and making a male/female comparison more than doubles the resources you need. So in the study they had 13 experimental groups. If you add another sex, and you want to do comparisons between them, you’d probably need 1.5x more animals because the more comparison you make, the more mice you would need to achieve statistical significance.
So in my lab we’ve also moved to using mostly female mice for most experiments, to satisfy journal policies and avoid this criticism from reviewers.
Do you use ovariectimized female mice?
Nope. Just regular B6, FVB or sometimes BALB/c. Guys like Rich Miller are 100% correct when they say it’s silly how most aging research is done on B6. But - you won’t get your papers rejected for using B6 mice, and you probably will face extra challenges if you use “non-standard” mice, without a really good justification. (I will say I’m not really an “aging” researcher, but we do try to incorporate some aspects into our studies)