Compound
Everything we've written on NAD+ — 7 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
7 articles
The David Sinclair NAD+ story — hype, evidence, honest assessment
In the late 1990s, a graduate student named David Sinclair was working in Lenny Guarente's lab at MIT, trying to understand why yeast cells age. The answer his experiments pointed toward involved a protein called Sir2 — Silent Information Regulator 2. In yeast, Sir2 controlled whether certain genomic regions were transcriptionally active or silenced, and its activity appeared to be linked to lifespan. When you increased Sir2 expression in yeast, the cells lived longer. When you inhibited it, they lived less long. Sinclair went on to characterize Sir2 and its mammalian cousins, the sirtuins, as what he would eventually describe as a master regulatory system of aging — a set of molecular sensors that respond to cellular stress and energy status and govern whether cells survive, repair themselves, or succumb to aging-associated dysfunction.
NAD+ and CD38 — why supplementing alone might not be enough
You start taking NMN. Your NAD+ levels come up, at least on a blood test. Three months later, maybe six, the effect seems to blunt. You're still taking it, the dose hasn't changed, but something about the initial lift has flattened. Maybe you increase the dose. Maybe it helps. Maybe it doesn't. You've entered a conversation that the supplement marketing doesn't prepare you for: that raising NAD+ levels is not just a question of what you put in, but of what's consuming it on the other end — and that consumption is running faster as you age.
NAD+ in cognitive function and neuroprotection
You notice it around mid-morning, maybe an hour or two after waking. The thoughts aren't quite connecting the way they used to. Words that were automatic are now effortful, just slightly — not the dramatic forgetting of a medical event, just a very quiet dimming. You'd dismiss it as tiredness or age if it weren't so consistent, if it weren't there even on the days when you slept well and ate well and did everything right. The cognitive baseline has shifted and the shift happened so gradually that you can't point to when it started. You just know it doesn't feel like before.
What people are reporting about NAD+ infusions
This article summarizes experiences reported in public online communities including Reddit, longevity forums, and discussion boards. We are not advocating human use of any compound discussed here. Many of the peptides discussed are not FDA-approved for the uses described, and some are explicitly not approved for human or veterinary use. What follows is a synthesis of what people have reported, presented to give readers context on the public conversation — not as guidance, not as evidence of safety or efficacy, and not as a recommendation. Decisions about any compound should be made with a qualified prescribing provider after a full medical evaluation.
NAD+ IV vs subcutaneous vs oral — what bioavailability research suggests
You've read the research, or at least enough of it. You understand that NAD+ declines with age, that sirtuins need it, that mitochondrial energy metabolism depends on it. You've decided the conversation is worth having with your prescribing provider. And then you hit the question that the popular articles tend to gloss over: take it how, exactly? A capsule? A drip? A weekly injection? The delivery route for NAD+ is not a minor implementation detail. For this particular molecule, it might be the most consequential decision in the entire protocol.
NAD+ vs NMN vs NR — the precursor conversation
You're standing in the supplement aisle — or the online equivalent of it, scrolling through a longevity stack that someone recommended on a podcast — and there are three things that look related: NAD+, NMN, and NR. They're all described as "NAD+ support." They're all priced somewhere between expensive and extremely expensive. They're all backed by citations to researchers whose names you half-recognize. And the differences between them are explained, in every product description you've read, in a way that somehow makes it less clear what you should actually be taking, not more.
Sirtuins — the longevity proteins and what they actually do
In the late 1990s, a yeast cell in Leonard Guarente's lab at MIT quietly upended the assumption that lifespan was a fixed parameter. The gene in question was Sir2 — Silent Information Regulator 2 — and when researchers added extra copies of it to yeast, the cells lived longer. When they deleted it, the cells died sooner. Nobody had expected a single gene to move the lifespan needle in either direction. The question the experiment opened wasn't just "what does Sir2 do" but something more unsettling: if a gene could regulate how long a cell lives, what exactly is the machinery of aging, and how close to the surface is it?