At age 72, Dr. Alan S. Green saw miraculous improvement in health, from feeling old to feeling young, after taking rapamycin once per week:
I attended college on a tennis scholarship and ran a marathon in just under 4 hours at age 40. But by age 70 my main physical activity was reduced to walking my two Shiba Innu dogs in the park. Then by age 72, I experienced angina and shortness of breath on small hills. As a trained pathologist I accepted the reality that I was in rather poor shape. My fasting blood sugar was up, my creatinine blood level was elevated indicating renal insufficiency and I couldn’t fit into any of my pants. I then began trying to learn about aging. I discovered a story more extraordinary and improbable than anything I had ever encountered in my lifetime.
[...]
Based upon empirical medicine principles, I decided rapamycin 6 mg once a week would be an aggressive treatment and 3 mg once every 10 days would be a conservative treatment. I decided to go with aggressive treatment. January 2016, I began the rapamycin-based Koschei formula with intent to take it for one year; in what could euphemistically be called a “proof-of-concept” experiment. I didn’t have to wait one year; by 4 months the results were miraculous. I lost 20 pounds, my waist-line went from 38 inches to 33. I bought a pair of size 32 jeans and didn’t have to wear joggers no more. I could walk 5 miles a day and ride a bike up hills without any hint of angina. Creatinine went from elevated to normal and fasting blood sugar went down. I thought I was Lazarus back from the dead. It’s now over 1 year and I feel great. I’ve also had no mouth sores, the most common clinical side-effect. For me, rapamycin is the world’s greatest medicine.
Dennis Mangan asked Dr. Green a number of questions:
PDM: I note that of the drugs you advocate for anti-aging, metformin, aspirin, and ACE inhibitors/AR blockers are cheap, while rapamycin is more expensive. Does any other drug come close to rapamycin in efficacy or is it indispensable? Of the four drugs, what fraction of anti-aging effect is due to rapamycin in your estimation?
ASG: Rapamycin is only $3.50 for 1 mg if you buy it on line with a prescription from Canada; therefore monthly cost might come to $50-100 a month.
My rough guess of the relative value of each as anti-aging drug would be as follows: rapamycin, ACE inhibitor/AR blocker, metformin, aspirin: 75, 18, 6, 1.
[...]
PDM: I was fascinated to learn about angiotensin disruption for anti-aging, which I’m not sure if I had heard of before, and also that it fits the growth vs longevity paradigm. (On second thought, I had heard of it, but I forgot. Must be the effects of age.) Do you think hypertension is a “normal” manifestation of aging and that everyone can expect to have it to some degree as they age?
ASG: The two best characterized systems which promote aging are the mTOR system and the angiotensin-renin system. Angiotensin II is the primary cause of hypertension; but angiotensin II also promotes atherosclerosis, damage to mitochondria and increase ROS in tissues. I think all older persons probably suffer from higher activity from angiotensin II than is healthy. So probably most old people had some degree of hypertension and they would benefit from being on angiotensin blocker/inhibitor (ARB/ACE). The important thing is to use one that crosses blood-brain barrier.
This is really super, super interesting. I went and did some looking at this. Way interesting.