Epitalon Dosage Chart and Calculator: What the Human Studies Actually Tested

Epitalon, sold by many shops as Epithalon, is a four-amino-acid peptide from aging research, and its dosing splits into two camps. One draws between 500mcg and 1mg daily, close to the 0.5mg used in the human study that tracked its effect on melatonin. The other, the one most protocols online repeat, draws 5 to 10mg a day. Both run in short courses of 10 to 20 days a few times a year, never year-round.

Simms Research’s Epithalon comes as a 10mg vial of white freeze-dried powder, $59. Every unit count below assumes that vial with 2mL of bacteriostatic water added.

Epitalon dosage calculator

Pick the water and the dose, and the calculator gives the units to draw on a U-100 insulin syringe. It opens on a 10mg vial with 2mL and a 500mcg dose: 10 units.

Epitalon dosage chart (10mg vial)

500mcg to 10mg a day, drawn once daily for the length of a course. Once 2mL of water goes into the 10mg vial, each unit marked on a U-100 insulin syringe is worth 50mcg of Epitalon:

The low end sits comfortably on a 0.5mL syringe, at 10 or 20 units. The top two rows outgrow it. A 5mg draw is 100 units, a 1mL syringe filled to its last line, or two 50-unit draws from a 0.5mL syringe. A 10mg day empties the vial, which comes out as two full 1mL syringes.

Other shops stock 20mg and 50mg vials, and some charts assume 1mL or 3mL of water. For any of those, the peptide calculator turns a dose into units; the chart above holds only for 10mg and 2mL.

How much bac water for Epitalon 10mg

2mL. That makes every 10 units 500mcg and puts the low protocols on round numbers. It is also the amount the reconstitution hub’s table lists for the Epithalon vial.

At four amino acids, Epitalon is one of the smallest peptides on the shelf, and the cake gives way almost as soon as the water reaches it. Let the water slide along the glass wall, tilt the vial slowly until no white is left, and it is done; a finished mix is as see-through as the water was. Write the date on the cap. Mixed Epitalon keeps 28 days in the fridge, which a 20-day course at 500mcg fits inside with time to spare. The routine that works for any vial is laid out in how to reconstitute peptides.

Five Epithalon vials can be mixed from a single 10mL bottle of Research Water, which Simms Research sells for $20. The bac water guide explains why a vial opened day after day needs water with a preservative in it, not plain sterile water.

Epitalon dosage per day

Either 500mcg to 1mg or 5 to 10mg, once a day. The two ranges come from different places.

The low range follows the human study. In 2021, 75 women took 0.5mg of Epitalon a day under the tongue for 20 days, and the melatonin by-product in their urine rose 1.6-fold against placebo (Ivko, Advances in Gerontology). The animal work used far less again, 0.1 to 1 microgram per mouse (Anisimov, Biogerontology, 2003).

The high range comes from epithalamin, the older pineal extract Epitalon was designed from. Its trials in older adults gave 10mg injections, five per course, twice a year (Korkushko, Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 2006), and those milligram amounts carried over to the synthetic peptide unchanged. No study has set a low and a high Epitalon dose side by side, so the choice between 1mg and 10mg a day is a choice between the two lines of research, not between a weak and a strong dose.

Epitalon peptide protocol: 10-day and 20-day cycles

A course is 10 or 20 days of once-daily draws, then four to six months off, which works out to two or three courses a year. The five protocols in common use, from a vial mixed with 2mL:

The two high protocols put the same 100mg through a course, ten vials, one spread across 20 days and the other packed into 10. The low ones finish inside a single vial and inside its 28 days in the fridge; a 1mg, 20-day course opens the second vial on day 11.

The schedule follows the research. The longest mouse studies gave five days a month for life, the human melatonin study ran 20 days, and the epithalamin trials repeated a course every six months for three years. Twice a year matches the human trials with the longest follow-up; a third course, four months after the second, is the upper end.

Epitalon for sleep: morning or night

Night. Research protocols draw Epitalon in the evening, an hour or two before sleep.

The reason is the pineal gland, the small gland that releases melatonin after dark and releases less of it with age. Epitalon’s best-documented effect is on that night signal. In old rhesus monkeys it raised evening melatonin and brought the daily cortisol curve back toward the pattern of young animals (Khavinson, Neuroendocrinology Letters, 2001); a later study lifted their night melatonin and left young monkeys unchanged (Goncharova, Experimental Gerontology, 2005). Epithalamin courses raised night melatonin in older people whose pineal output had dropped (Korkushko, 2004). An evening draw sits in the hours when that rise is meant to begin.

Sleep is also what researchers most often say they notice first, in the opening days of a course: an easier pull toward sleep after the evening draw and, for some, vivid dreams. Sleep-focused protocols often pair Epitalon with DSIP, a separate sleep peptide Simms Research also stocks, each drawn from its own vial.

What is Epitalon peptide used for?

Aging research. What Epitalon does in the studies runs along two lines: telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes that shorten each time a cell divides, and the pineal gland’s melatonin rhythm covered above.

The telomere work began in St. Petersburg. Added to human fetal lung cells that had no telomerase, the enzyme that rebuilds telomeres, Epitalon switched it on and the telomeres grew longer (Khavinson, Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 2003). A year later the same group showed what that meant for the cells: untreated cultures stopped dividing at the 34th passage, while treated ones reached the 44th and kept going (Khavinson, Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine, 2004). In 2025 a team at Brunel University London repeated the core finding in normal human cells, with telomeres lengthening as the dose rose (Al-Dulaimi, Biogerontology).

In animals the results are modest rather than dramatic. Treated CBA mice lived 5.3% longer on average, and the oldest survived about 10 months past the oldest untreated mouse (Anisimov, Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, 2001). In Swiss-derived SHR mice, average lifespan didn’t move, but the longest-lived tenth lived 13.3% longer and bone marrow chromosome damage fell by 17% (Anisimov, Biogerontology, 2003). Most of this record comes from the St. Petersburg group, which gives the independent Brunel result its weight.

Epitalon vs Epithalon vs Epithalamin

Epitalon and Epithalon are the same peptide, Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly, spelled two ways in translation from Russian; Epithalone and AEDG are two more names for it. A vial labeled any of them holds the same four amino acids, which is why Simms Research’s Epithalon page lists both spellings.

Epithalamin is a different thing: the original extract of cattle pineal glands, first described in 1973, a mix of many peptides. Epitalon was designed from its amino acid makeup as a single synthetic tetrapeptide, and in 2017 the same sequence was found inside the pineal extract itself. Epithalamin was approved as a drug in Russia; Epitalon is the research peptide. Their milligrams don’t trade one for one, since 10mg of extract is not 10mg of AEDG, and that gap is the root of the two dosing camps.

Epitalon and cancer

In the animal studies, Epitalon-treated mice and rats developed fewer or smaller tumors, or the same number, rather than more.

Mice bred to grow breast tumors, given five-day courses every month, ended up with fewer tumors in total, the largest a third smaller, and 3.7 times less activity of the HER-2/neu cancer gene inside them (Anisimov, International Journal of Cancer, 2002). CBA mice had fewer spontaneous tumors, mostly in the lung (Anisimov, Mechanisms of Ageing and Development, 2001). In SHR mice the overall tumor count didn’t change, but leukemia was six times rarer (Anisimov, Biogerontology, 2003).

The question comes up because of telomerase: most cancer cells keep it switched on so they can divide without limit. The 2025 Brunel study looked at exactly that. In two breast cancer cell lines, Epitalon lengthened telomeres as well, but through ALT, a route that doesn’t use telomerase, while in normal cells it worked through telomerase and ALT barely moved (Al-Dulaimi, Biogerontology, 2025). That is a result in culture dishes, with no tumor growth measured, and no human study has tracked cancer outcomes with Epitalon.

Epitalon side effects

Few, wherever they were recorded. In the St. Petersburg retinitis pigmentosa trial, 162 patients aged 18 to 72 were examined, and none of those given 10 days of Epitalon reported a side effect, though the doses there were a few micrograms (Khavinson, Neuroendocrinology Letters, 2002). Two three-year epithalamin trials in older adults, one followed for 12 years, recorded no serious adverse events, and mice given courses for their whole lives ate and weighed the same as untreated mice.

What researchers report outside the studies is mild and short-lived: a brief sting at the injection site, sleepiness after evening draws, vivid dreams in the first nights, and now and then a headache early in a course.

Epithalon batch test results

Slightly over label. Simms Research’s newest Epithalon batch came back from an independent ISO-certified lab in July 2026 at an average of 10.53mg per vial, three vials checked, and 99.74% pure:

In practice the surplus is too small to change a draw: with 10.53mg dissolved in 2mL, ten units hold roughly 530mcg, within a single line on the syringe. To work from the certificate rather than the label, enter 10.53 as the vial size in the calculator.

The Epithalon lab results page carries both certificates as full documents, the lab results library holds every other compound’s, and a separate guide covers reading a certificate of analysis line by line.

Frequently asked questions

How do you use Epitalon peptide?

Research protocols add 2mL of bac water to the 10mg vial, draw the chart amount once each evening for a 10- or 20-day course, keep the mixed vial cold, and repeat the course two or three times a year.

What dose of Epitalon do protocols start at?

500mcg a day, 10 units at 2mL. Low protocols stay there or move to 1mg; the high ones hold a single fixed amount, 5 or 10mg, from the first day of the course to the last.

When does Epitalon start working?

Changes in sleep are what researchers report first, within days. The measured effects took longer: the melatonin rise in the human study was read after 20 days, and the cell studies ran over weeks of culture.

Can Epitalon be taken under the tongue or as a nasal spray?

Both routes appear in the research: the human melatonin study gave it under the tongue, and rat studies gave it through the nose. Epithalon from Simms Research is freeze-dried powder for mixing.

Can Epitalon be stacked with GHK-Cu?

Yes, each from its own vial. Simms Research’s Reverse Bundle pairs a 10mg Epithalon vial with 100mg of GHK-Cu for $85; the copper peptide’s daily range is in the GHK-Cu dosage guide.

Does Epitalon need to be refrigerated?

Ideally, yes. Sealed powder is happiest cold, at 2 to 8°C, or frozen at −20°C for long storage, yet it shrugs off weeks at room temperature, so it travels without ice. After mixing, it lives in the fridge and is finished within 28 days. The peptide refrigeration guide covers both stages.

Is Epitalon FDA approved?

No. It is not an approved drug in the US, and Simms Research supplies Epithalon strictly for lab research.