Hi all, I’m 35 year old male, 5’10’', and 170lbs. From what I can tell, 6mg of Rapa per week ought to be both a safe and effective dose for extending lifespan and healthspan.
The trouble is, I have side effects at 6mg—I almost always have diarrhea at that dose, and I often have an unpleasant kind of hypomania as well. And then frequently, I get headaches.
If I want no side effects at all, I need to go down to just 3mg per week. But is 3mg too low to accrue meaningful health benefits over time? I feel frustrated, because it’s as if I’ve discovered an interesting pharmaceutical drug that works beautifully for lots of people, but doesn’t seem to work for me.
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Beth
#2
You will find that it’s very individual and many people here take much higher and much lower doses, so your experience is not usual at all!!!
I take 8mg but my husband can’t take more than 4mg. There are some on here who can only take 1mg!
Also, as shown through having labs done, the same dose does different things to different people. I’m only 104 pounds, but I found out through labs that 6mg was not doing enough, and a bigger man on here found 6mg was probably doing too much. All this is to say, don’t stress out and just take what you can. If you are in the US, eventually you can get labs done through gethealthspan.com for $25. The others here can offer guidance on what you should be seeing.
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You don’t have to take it every week.
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Hey Chris,
You are on the younger side of off-label users - you do not have as much cell damage and are before the 40 year old spike. Lucky you!
I think 3 mg would be fine - that was my 32 year old son’s dose when he started - no issues.
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FWIW, 3mg once a week was the effective high dose in the PEARL trial. After a year or so, no measurable effects, positive or negative in men, some minor muscoskeletal benefits in women.
But everyone is different, as Beth says. I take 6mg once a week, and have apparently very slow clearance according to LabCorp (5.6 ng/mL at 50 hours post dose), so it’ll be hard for me to go up in dosage, as I may not hit a trough in a week (I’m waiting on LabCorp results of sirolimus levels 6 days post dose EDIT: I just received my results: 2.3 ng/mL). And so far, the effects are minor (that I can detect).
I would recommend measuring your sirolimus levels. It’s the only way to know. Unfortunately it can be inconvenient and costly - I test every six weeks or so, about $500-$700 a pop for very extensive tests of a ton of biomarkers (because I’m simultaneously trialling various other drugs). You may find a dose that works for you.
There is one other option: you may want to try everolimus. In principle it should work the same, but might be more tolerable. Of course, it doesn’t have the track record in animal data that rapamycin has, but on the flip side it actually has more rigorous human data (at least until now), and good results in the Mannick study, where 5mg once a week was validated to have immune function benefits.
I am personally researching a more exotic option of combining low doses of both, but that’s way out on a limb, and very high uncertainty/risk, but that might be another way for me to maximize benefits along the mTOR pathway without the downsides of higher dose slow clearance of rapamycin.
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Though ChatGPT5 thinks we can have our cake and eat it also.
By raising mTORC1 back to beneficial exercise levels without affecting rapamycin trough levels.
ChatGPT 5:
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Keep dose-day protein modest; then front-load leucine-rich feedings around your lifts starting ≥48 h post-dose. This won’t reduce trough levels and won’t undo the prior autophagy signal; it simply uses the period when mTORC1 responsiveness has rebounded.
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Take rapamycin the same way each week (with or without food, but be consistent), and avoid grapefruit/strong CYP3A4 inhibitors or inducers, which do change exposure.
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If you ever find that heavy training still feels “blunted,” slide the big session to 60–72 h post-dose—this adapts to individual PK without changing the principle (drug levels fall, nutrient/mechanical signals rise). The underlying drug levels, not the protein, are what set that window. FDA Access Data
Bottom line: Your high-protein/leucine meals at ~48 h won’t lower sirolimus levels or nullify its effects; they’ll help you capitalize on the period when mTORC1 is responsive again, while the earlier post-dose window delivered the longevity/autophagy signal you’re after.
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It’s interesting you mention hypomania. Rapamycin is demonstrated to have a number of interesting effects on behavior including being good for alleviating PTSD and autism.
I certainly feel more energy on rapamycin. You could pathologize it as hypomania, but I just feel better, more sociable, energetic and happier.
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Yeah, I would love to have me some hypomania.
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I feel pretty great on rapamycin so long as I don’t get mouth sores lol!
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Regarding mouth sores. I get them on Rapa however I have started using probiotics for oral health as I have gum problems and have not had any mouth sores since I started using them. I can’t be certain that the probiotics solved the problem but it might be worth trying. I started using the Life Extension Oral Hygiene lozenges, They seemed to have a positive impact on my gums but have moved on to Naturewise Oral Health Probiotics as they contain more strains.
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I had a particularly bad mouth sore issue with rapamycin until I figured out what was going on:
A_User
#12
I doubt this has been demonstrated, can you link what you mean?
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Vlasko
#14
Did you start at two milligrams per week and slowly titrate up to six milligrams? Or did you just start at six milligrams?
Week 1: 2 mg
Week 2: 3 mg
Week 3: 4 mg
Week 4: 5 mg
Week 5: 6 mg
Agetron
#15
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