AOD-9604 Dosage Chart.

Twelve units, if you mixed a 5 mg vial with 2 mL of bacteriostatic water. That gives 2,500 mcg/mL, and one unit on a U-100 syringe is 0.01 mL, so one unit equals 25 mcg. On that same mix, 250 mcg is 10 units and 500 mcg is 20 units. Change either the vial size or the water volume and every one of those numbers changes: a 10 mg vial in the same 2 mL makes each unit 50 mcg, so 300 mcg becomes 6 units, not 12. Always recalculate from the vial in front of you rather than reusing a unit count you read somewhere.

Self-administration reporting, not a trial. A 2026 Frontiers in Endocrinology review of performance-enhancing peptides that act on the GH-IGF-1 axis records the range as 250 to 500 mcg per day subcutaneously, given in two to three injections, ideally before exercise or in the morning fasted. That is the whole documented basis for the injectable protocol. There is no dose-finding study, no published subcutaneous pharmacokinetics, and no distribution telling you which value inside that range is more common than another. Treat it as convention that people converge on rather than a validated therapeutic dose.

No published trial has shown that it does. Six randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials in roughly 900 adults ran from 2001 to 2006. The two designed around weight (300 people over 12 weeks at oral doses of 1 to 30 mg a day, and 502 people over 24 weeks at 0.25 to 1 mg a day) did not produce a result the sponsor took forward, and the 24-week study failed its primary weight-loss endpoint. The positive data is in rodents: in obese Zucker rats given 500 mcg/kg orally for 19 days, body weight gain was reduced to 15.8 ± 0.6 g against 35.6 ± 0.8 g in controls. Note the wording: reduced weight gain, not weight loss. The animals still got heavier. That gap between rodents and people is the entire story of this compound.

Habit, mostly. AOD-9604 is sold as a lyophilised vial like every other research peptide, so it gets handled like one. There is also a reasonable-sounding argument that injection sidesteps the gut, so subcutaneous delivery should be more efficient than a tablet. The problem is that "should be" is the whole case. No human pharmacokinetic study of subcutaneous AOD-9604 has been published, so the subcutaneous dose equivalent to a 1 mg oral tablet, or to the 25 – 400 mcg/kg intravenous infusions the trials used, is genuinely unknown.

Nobody has published one in humans. Vendor pages quote confident-sounding numbers with no source you can trace back to a study, and you should treat every one of them as unsourced. What is documented is narrower: in pigs, orally administered AOD-9604 was well absorbed but showed rapid degradation kinetics, and in Cox’s 2015 in vitro work the parent peptide broke down quickly in serum while one metabolite, CRSVEGSCG, proved considerably more stable than the parent, stable enough that anti-doping labs screen for the metabolite to widen the detection window.

No, and this is the one claim about AOD-9604 that is genuinely well supported. IGF-1 was measured across the 12-week trial (1 – 30 mg/day) and the 24-week trial (0.25 – 1 mg/day) and did not change in any group; the p-values against placebo at 12 weeks ranged from 0.38 to 1.00. Oral glucose tolerance tests showed no significant change at any dose or timepoint, and no anti-AOD9604 antibodies were detected in any subject tested. The structural explanation holds up: the fragment overlaps hGH binding site 1 but is missing site 2 entirely, so it cannot dimerise the GH receptor. It does not run through the GH/IGF-1 axis, which is also why it does not bring the fluid retention, joint ache and glucose drift that full-length hGH does.

Only in rabbits, and only by a route you are not using. In a collagenase-induced knee osteoarthritis model, 0.25 mg of AOD9604 injected directly into the joint once weekly improved lameness and cartilage histology, with the best results when it was combined with hyaluronic acid. That is an intra-articular injection into a rabbit knee. There is no human joint trial, and no evidence that a systemic subcutaneous dose reaches cartilage at any meaningful concentration. A 2026 review of therapeutic peptides in orthopaedics put the field bluntly: preclinical studies are promising, and clinical trials are absent.

It is not an approved medicine. DailyMed lists no labelled product under the name and ClinicalTrials.gov has zero registered studies for it; the Australian trials ran under the TGA’s Clinical Trial Notification scheme rather than a public registry. It is sold as a research chemical. For tested athletes the position is unambiguous: AOD-9604 is banned by WADA, and a validated solid-phase-extraction urine method detects it down to 50 pg/mL, with a metabolite screen that widens the detection window further. If you are subject to testing, do not touch it.

It deserves a straight answer rather than being buried. In the 12-week study, five serious adverse events were tumours, four of them malignant: a basal cell carcinoma, a moderate lipoma (which is benign) and a squamous cell carcinoma in the 20 mg group, a breast cancer in the 5 mg group, and a melanoma in the 10 mg group. The investigator judged none of them related to treatment, and that reasoning is defensible. There were no cases at all in the highest dose group at 30 mg, so there is no dose-response; three were skin cancers in a 12-week Australian study where background skin-cancer incidence is among the highest in the world; the cohort was clinically obese with a median BMI of 40, a population with elevated baseline cancer risk; and AOD-9604 demonstrably does not raise IGF-1, which is the mechanism you would actually worry about. Even so, 12 and 24 weeks is not a cancer-safety timeframe and nobody has followed these subjects for years. Anyone with a cancer history should stay away.

It is borrowed logic, not tested logic. The reasoning is that insulin suppresses lipolysis, so a fat-mobilising peptide ought to be given when insulin is lowest: first thing, before food. Nothing in the AOD-9604 programme tested timing; the oral trials simply dosed daily. Following the convention costs nothing, and anchoring the injection to waking makes you more consistent, so there is no reason not to do it. Just do not credit the timing with results it has never been shown to produce.