Interesting. It’s ironic that rapamycin might be beneficial for prevention of cognitive problems following anesthesia since any time you require anesthesia you’re usually undergoing a seriously invasive process that requires long healing that rapamycin might slow down, at least at high doses. So for efficient healing post surgery it’s probably usually ideal to take a break from rapamycin, but if you were to do that you would miss out on the potential benefits for post-operative cognitive problems.
1 Like
Perhaps what would work is one pulse of higher dose rapamycin or everolimus to get the benefit, without the possible immune system reduction?
1 Like
I agree, that might be a good method. It’s possible that to get the benefits of rapamycin you just need to have it in the body at the time of anesthesia not after. In that case, it might work to take a large dose of rapamycin just before the anesthesia and then take no rapamycin for several weeks while healing from the operation. This seems to be in line with what they did in the study. Apparently the mice were given rapamycin at a very high dose for several days prior to the operation but not on the day of the operation or after it. From the full text:
“Rats in the sham + rapamycin and surgery + rapamycin groups were intraperitoneally injected with rapamycin at 10 mg/kg/d for seven consecutive days until the day before the sham operation or exploratory laparotomy.”
1 Like
Ah - I think we’ve solved it 
And I suspect Everolimus would be the better product for this given the shorter half life (about 28 hours vs. 60 to 70 hours for rapamycin). So - it would be out of your system more quickly for the post-operative recovery.
Anyone else have thoughts?
1 Like
It’s once again fascinating to see a relationship between autophagy and critical physiological processes, in this case the release of neurotransmitters.
1 Like
