What the published literature reports about epithalon dosage: the doses and course cadences used in the AEDG research record, reconstitution math for a 10 mg vial, and the missing pharmacokinetic data. Research context, not dosing advice.
Epithalon (also written epitalon or epithalone) is the synthetic tetrapeptide Ala-Glu-Asp-Gly — AEDG — a four-residue sequence of about 390 g/mol, supplied lyophilized. It came out of Vladimir Khavinson's group at the St. Petersburg Institute of Bioregulation and Gerontology as a defined synthetic stand-in for epithalamin, a polypeptide extract of bovine pineal gland. That distinction matters more than any number below: much of the long-horizon human data attributed to "epithalon" was generated with epithalamin, the extract, not the tetrapeptide. Any dosing discussion that blurs the two is reporting one compound's schedule under another compound's name.
What follows is a literature summary — what published studies used, and how the arithmetic of a 10 mg vial works. It is not a protocol, and it is not advice.
The 2025 review by Araj and colleagues in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences ("Overview of Epitalon — Highly Bioactive Pineal Tetrapeptide with Promising Properties") is the most useful single map of the dosing record, because it separates what was given to animals from what was given to people.
Animal work used microgram quantities, not milligram ones: roughly 0.1–1 µg per mouse subcutaneously, five times weekly or daily; and 0.5–100 µg per rat across subcutaneous, intraperitoneal, intranasal, and oral routes. Rhesus work used intramuscular delivery. Scaled per kilogram, these are small exposures — a point often lost when microgram animal data is quoted next to milligram vials.
Human work with the synthetic tetrapeptide is limited to two small studies in that review: a retinitis pigmentosa trial delivering 5.0 µg per eye parabulbarly for ten consecutive days (n≈162), and a circadian-rhythm study using 0.5 mg/day sublingually for twenty days (n≈75). That is the extent of the published human dosing record for AEDG itself — two studies, two routes, neither a dose-ranging trial.
The epithalamin courses are what the widely repeated "10 mg" figure comes from. In the Khavinson-group elderly cohorts, treatment was structured as five intramuscular injections of 10 mg at three-day intervals, with the course repeated roughly every six months over about three years, then followed for years afterward (Khavinson and Morozov, Neuro Endocrinology Letters, 2003, and later follow-up reports). Those papers describe favourable long-term outcomes and no serious adverse reactions — but again, that is the pineal extract, from a single research group, without independent replication.
Every schedule in this literature is a short course followed by a long gap — ten to twenty days on, months off, one to three courses per year — rather than continuous administration. The stated rationale in the Khavinson literature is that the peptide is proposed to act as a regulatory signal on gene expression, with effects outlasting exposure, rather than by sustained receptor occupancy. That is a hypothesis carried by the same group that generated the data, not an established pharmacological fact. It is worth understanding as the internal logic of the published schedules, not as a reason to trust them.
The arithmetic is the one part of this page that is not in scientific dispute. For a 10 mg lyophilized vial of epithalon:
| Bacteriostatic water added | Resulting concentration | 1 unit on a U-100 syringe | 0.5 mg measures as |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 mL | 10 mg/mL | 100 µg | 5 units |
| 2 mL | 5 mg/mL | 50 µg | 10 units |
| 5 mL | 2 mg/mL | 20 µg | 25 units |
A U-100 insulin syringe reads 100 units to 1 mL, so each unit is 0.01 mL regardless of what is in the vial — the concentration is what changes the mapping. Note the mismatch this creates with the animal literature: at 2 mL of diluent, a single unit holds 50 µg, which is already above the entire per-animal dose used in most rodent work. Dilute thinly and you lose measurement resolution; dilute heavily and you shorten the useful life of the reconstituted solution.
For the general method, see Peptide dosing math: mg, mcg and IU conversion and How to reconstitute peptides.
There is no peer-reviewed human pharmacokinetic dataset for AEDG. The 2025 IJMS review states this plainly and treats it as a gap, noting that short peptides of this class are typically unstable and degrade rapidly in vivo, and that comprehensive toxicity characterization is still missing after roughly twenty-five years of research. Half-life figures circulating on vendor pages — anything from "under five minutes" to "two to four hours" — are estimates and extrapolations, not measured values, and they disagree with each other by two orders of magnitude. Treat any schedule justified by a specific half-life number for this compound as resting on an assumption.
The telomerase result that drives most interest in epithalon is in vitro: Khavinson, Bondarev and Butyugov reported in the Bulletin of Experimental Biology and Medicine (2003) that adding the peptide to telomerase-negative human fetal fibroblast cultures induced hTERT expression, telomerase activity, and telomere elongation. A 2025 Biogerontology paper from a UK group reported telomere lengthening in human cell lines at around 1 µg/mL over three weeks, via telomerase upregulation or ALT — a useful independent in-vitro signal, and still a cell-culture concentration with no defined relationship to any injected dose in an organism.
So the honest summary: microgram-scale animal data, two small human studies with the actual tetrapeptide, a long-running extract literature from one group, no human PK, no dose-ranging, no published stereoisomer or stability characterization. The mechanism, per the 2025 review, remains unclear. For the wider picture see the epithalon research overview and epithalon vs MOTS-c.
Is there an established epithalon dosage? No. There is no approved indication, no regulatory dosing label, and no published dose-ranging study for the tetrapeptide. What exists is a scattered record of what individual studies used — described above — which is not the same thing as an established dose.
Where does the "10 mg for 10 days" figure come from? Mostly from the epithalamin literature, where courses of five 10 mg intramuscular injections at three-day intervals were repeated every six months. Epithalamin is a bovine pineal extract, not AEDG. The figure has migrated across the naming gap without the caveat attached.
Why do animal studies use micrograms when vials are sold in milligrams? Because vial sizing follows manufacturing and handling convenience, not the published research ranges. A 10 mg vial holds several orders of magnitude more peptide than a typical per-animal dose in the rodent literature, which is exactly why the reconstitution arithmetic above matters for anyone designing a laboratory experiment.
What is epithalon's half-life? Unpublished. No human pharmacokinetic study has been reported. Short peptides of this class are generally cleared quickly, but the specific figures quoted online are estimates, not data.
Has the telomerase finding been replicated? Partially, and only in cell culture. A 2025 Biogerontology paper from an independent UK laboratory reported telomere lengthening in human cell lines. No human trial has measured telomere or telomerase endpoints after epithalon administration.
