Epithalon Dosage Chart.

The dose people run is 5–10 mg subcutaneously once a day for a 10–20 day course, once or twice a year. On a 50 mg vial reconstituted with 2 mL of bacteriostatic water (25 mg/mL), 5 mg is 20 units on a U-100 syringe and 10 mg is 40 units. Where that range comes from is worth saying out loud: it appears on vendor sites and in community protocols, not in any published study. The only systemic dose ever given to humans in print was 0.5 mg a day, and the animal work used micrograms per animal. So if you want the number with a paper behind it, that is 0.5 mg; if you want the number people actually inject, that is 5 mg. Both are legitimate choices as long as you know which one you are making.

Yes, but barely. Two small studies carry usable dose detail. Khavinson's group treated 162 retinitis pigmentosa patients aged 18 to 72 with 5.0 µg of Epitalon per eye by parabulbar injection for 10 days, reporting visual acuity gains of 0.15 to 0.20, a positive clinical effect in 90% of cases, and a total visual field border broadened by 90 to 120 degrees in 64.8% of patients. The patient count, dose and acuity figures come from the 2025 IJMS review rather than the 2002 abstract, which carries none of them. Separately, Ivko and colleagues gave roughly 75 middle-aged women 0.5 mg a day sublingually for 20 days, with placebo and control cohorts, and measured the melatonin and clock-gene changes described above. A third report from the same St Petersburg group describes both Epithalamin and Epitalon raising night melatonin in elderly people with pineal insufficiency, without publishing a comparable dose. Note the eye trial used an active comparator, not a placebo, and a ClinicalTrials.gov search for epitalon or epithalon returns zero registered studies.

No, and this confusion is why Epitalon looks far better evidenced than it is. Epithalamin is a bovine pineal extract, a complex peptide mixture. Epitalon is a single synthetic tetrapeptide, Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly, 390.35 g/mol. The long-term human geroprotection results people cite for "Epitalon" (a 12-year randomised study in which mortality among treated elderly subjects was 28% lower, and a coronary cohort given six courses over three years and followed for 15) used Epithalamin, the extract. A 2007 Adv Gerontol paper by Korkushko and Khavinson names the two as separate preparations in the same sentence. When you buy a lyophilised Epithalon vial you are buying the tetrapeptide, which does not inherit the extract's decades of follow-up.

Nobody has published one, in humans or in animals. There is no measured plasma concentration, no time-to-peak, no clearance figure and no bioavailability estimate for any route. A PubMed search crossing epitalon with pharmacokinetics, half-life or biodistribution returns nothing about this peptide. What the 2025 IJMS review does note is that short peptides such as Epitalon are typically unstable and degrade rapidly in vivo. At 390 Da and four amino acids with no protecting modifications, minutes rather than hours is the reasonable expectation, but that is inference from peptide chemistry and not a measurement. Once-daily dosing is a convention, not a schedule derived from kinetics.

It is real in a dish and unproven in a person. Khavinson's 2003 paper showed telomerase activation and telomere elongation in telomerase-negative human fetal fibroblast cultures. The 2025 Biogerontology study reproduced telomere extension in normal fibroblast and epithelial lines at a single 1.0 µg/mL exposure over three weeks. Neither involved dosing a living human, and no study has measured telomere length in a person before and after taking Epitalon. Worth knowing too: in that same 2025 paper the two breast cancer lines lengthened their telomeres through ALT (the alternative lengthening of telomeres route some cancers use to stay immortal without telomerase), which is why cancer history sits at the top of the do-not-use list. That ALT finding was assayed at one concentration only, so it is a signal to respect rather than a dose-response.

Alcohol-swab both vial tops and let them dry. Run bacteriostatic water slowly down the inside wall of the vial rather than onto the powder, then swirl until clear; do not shake. A 50 mg vial in 2 mL gives 25 mg/mL, so 5 mg is 20 units and 10 mg is 40 units. If you are running the 0.5 mg tier, do not use that mix: 0.5 mg would be 2 units, which no insulin syringe measures accurately. Reconstitute a 10 mg vial in 2 mL instead (5 mg/mL) and draw 10 units. Keep unopened powder in the freezer; once mixed, refrigerate at 2–8 °C. A 10–20 day course finishes well inside the useful life of a mixed vial.

Evening is the convention, and it is at least mechanistically coherent: the one measured human effect is on nocturnal melatonin output and clock gene expression, so dosing ahead of the night you are trying to influence makes sense. But no study has ever compared morning against evening dosing, so this is reasoning rather than evidence. If you get next-morning grogginess in the first few days, shifting the dose earlier in the evening is a sensible adjustment. Consistency matters more than the exact hour: pick a time and keep it for the whole course, otherwise you cannot interpret your own sleep data. And do not drive or operate machinery until you know how a course affects your next-morning alertness.

Twice a year, with 3 to 6 months between courses, is the standard advice, and it is convention with nothing measured behind it. No published study has run a second course of Epitalon in a human, so nobody has established how long any effect lasts or whether repeat dosing does something different. The Epithalamin extract work used six courses over three years, but that is a different preparation and the schedule does not transfer. Longer gaps are the safer guess. The more useful question is not the interval but whether the first course produced anything you can point to.